A recent Washington Post column by Steven Petrow describes his experience with volunteerism at MSK, both as a patient and a volunteer. His interaction with MSK volunteers began on his first night as a patient 35 years ago, when a volunteer from the patient-to-patient program came to his room and made him realize he had hope for life after cancer. About a decade later, Petrow joined the volunteer program, becoming one of the 900 people between the ages of 14 and 90 who give their time and talents as MSK volunteers.

A volunteer (in blue coat) and a caregiver. (Source: Richard DeWitt)

To learn more about volunteering at MSK, visit the Department of Volunteer Resources website.

The recent American Association for Cancer Research Annual Meeting placed MSK in the spotlight recently, both for research being performed here and for expert opinions. Here are two such featured items:

• Since 2017, CAR-T therapy has been used as treatment for forms of leukemia and lymphoma. Medical professionals collect and modify a sample of a patient’s immune cells, then return the altered cells to the patient to target and kill cancer cells. MSK’s Prasad Adusumilli and his team developed a CAR-T therapy targeting cancers outside the bloodstream—mesothelioma and lung and breast cancers that spread to the chest wall—and conducted a small phase I clinical trial. The trial found the therapy to be safe and early signs of the immunotherapy’s effectiveness are promising. Read more from the Associated Press, Daily Mail, and The Scientist.
• Two articles quoted MSK’s Monica Morrow’s assessment of a study performed by researchers at Loma Linda University and presented at the meeting. The retrospective study looked at National Cancer Database data from 2010–2012 to determine whether surgery impacted survival for women with HER2+ metastatic breast cancer. It found that women who received surgery were more frequently white, younger, and with private insurance. These socioeconomic factors account at least in part for their improved outcomes after receiving surgery. Dr. Morrow does not believe this study is sufficient to change clinical practice, in large part due to the selection bias in the patient population receiving surgery. She is awaiting results of a randomized trial currently underway.

Researchers at MSK have developed a free online tool to automate the interpretation of genetic variants. The study, led by computational biologist Vignesh Ravichandran and supervised by Dr. Vijai Joseph, was published in February in Genetics in Medicine and reported recently by GenomeWeb.

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Until recently only a few genes, like BRCA1 and BRCA2, were tested in people with a family history of cancer. Thanks to declining costs and technological advances, labs now offer broader gene panel testing for hereditary cancers. However, interpreting the genetic variants uncovered by sequencing is time consuming and challenging, taking up two hours for a novel variant.

In response to these challenges, the MSK team created the automated tool PathoMAN. It uses guidelines from the American College of Medical Genetics and Genomics and the Association of Molecular Pathology as a framework while aggregating publicly available records of evidence to determine clinical significance. When tested against a manually classified gold-standard set of 3,513 variants from three major commercial labs, PathoMAN concorded with 94.4% of the manually curated pathogenic variants. PathoMAN is fast and uniform, and it generates a variant curation report for one variant in 30 seconds.

The research team next plans to incorporate natural language processing into PathoMAN to allow it to add scientific literature to its analyses.

PathoMAN is openly available to the research community at http://pathoman.mskcc.org/.