MEET THE PATIENTS WHERE THEY ARE: a new perspective on translational research in the field to accelerate precision oncology
Judith Tam ALK Lung Cancer Research Initiative Team Members in Nashville. Photo courtesy Michigan Medicine.
Team members of the Judith Tam ALK Lung Cancer Research Initiative ventured out to Nashville on July 18th for the 2024 ALK Positive Summit, to embark on an unprecedented research blood collection which took place July 19th and 20th. This was the culmination of 5 months of intense visioning with ALK Positive, Inc and sculpting of every detail of the whole process. Over a few short weeks and up to the day of while traveling down to Nashville, 119 research participants were consented and enrolled to participate in the project of the initiative by Mary Horn and Laura Goo.
Our research team, empowered by our initiative’s mission and vision, was not to be stalled by the last minute need to change up the transport vehicle in order to accommodate the giant boxes of needed supplies or halted by the Microsoft CrowdStrike glitch, which left our sample processing team of bench researchers grounded in MI that Friday morning. After turning a board room into a lab space, Dr. Sofia Merajver, PI for the Judith Tam ALK Lung Cancer Research Initiative, donned her lab coat and jumped to action to process the precious samples of blood with the help of Dr. Melvin McInnis, a loyal volunteer. As the ALK Program Manager, I oversaw the overall set up and blood collection processes as well as the transport between the blood collection room and the processing ‘lab”, while Mary Horn, Clinical Research Technician, checked in the participants. Habib Serhan and Dr. LiWei Bao, research lab specialists, jumped in another car rental after their flights were cancelled and drove the 8 hours straight to Nashville to join Dr. Merajver with the blood processing on Friday evening and throughout Saturday, and thus, our team was finally complete.
Months of planning went into organizing every aspect of this research collection after an idea was sparked and an invitation was extended from ALK Positive to Dr. Angel Qin, the Clinical Lead for the ALK Initiative, who also presented and participated in discussion panels during the Summit.
Following a fairly eventful adventure exploring how the samples could be safely and rapidly obtained from participants in a hotel setting, Gifted Touch Mobile Phlebotomy LLC, a local phlebotomy team was contracted to draw the samples, after careful vetting and in person interview by Dr. Merajver during a brief prior trip to Nashville. Pamela Jimson and her team had the highest skill and precision draws and garnered rave reviews from the research participants, who expressed that they made them feel at ease and taken care of. “Overall, we collected blood from 109 patients, and we intend to take multiple approaches in studying them, including cell-free DNA and RNA sequencing, whole-blood RNA sequencing, plasma protein mass spectrometry, plasma metabolomics, and circulating tumor cell (CTC) isolation and characterization” stated Habib Serhan, a researcher who started in the Merajver lab as an undergraduate 2 years ago, remains as a staff member, and now awaits admittance to medical school to follow in his mentor footsteps. Dr. LiWei Bao, who has been a researcher in the Merajver group for 26 years, completed the processing team. Her impeccable work and training of countless junior researchers in the lab, made her expertise invaluable during this new undertaking in field research collection.
It was wonderful and emotional for all of us in the team to see the flood of Maize and Blue Rogel Cancer Center shirts, which were provided to participants as a token of appreciation, across the conference on the second day as well as posted on social media. For us, it represented the generosity of spirit and indomitable and selfless enthusiasm of patients and families to contribute to find new cures for ALK-positive lung cancer, the main focus of the Judith Tam Initiative at the University of Michigan. During the 2 days, we received nonstop encouragement and hugs from patients and families and from ALK Positive officers: the immense strength of our common goal to cure this disease is forged by this unbreakable connection.
For Dr. Sofia Merajver, planning this project has been a valued and exacting constant companion for 5 months, night and day. She says: “ALK Positive and all the Summit attendee participants honored us with their trust in undertaking this project: we all knew full well it had never been done before. We felt the responsibility that came with such trust and carefully planned every single detail. At the same time, the historic nature of this specific project obligates us to collect the samples and process them with extreme care and uniformity, so that life-saving knowledge can continue to be gleaned for many years to come. I feel especially honored to be approached now by other colleagues wishing to pursue a similar project with other cancer groups. I am enthusiastic to share the whole process, all the details of how we did it and what we learned, so that we can honor the ancient principle of medical mentorship: watch one, do one, teach one (except we did not get to watch first this time!).”
A successful collection of this large number of participants with the same rare form of lung cancer, at the same location, and within a 24hr timeframe is unprecedented and should offer the opportunity for critical discoveries. We are excited to be at the helm of this project and eagerly await the new knowledge that results from the findings. We are grateful beyond what words can express appropriately to the participants and their families, to ALK Positive for their strong support of our initiative, to the staff of the Hutton Hotel, and to all the colleagues who unanimously expressed support and unequivocal enthusiasm, and the Gifted Touch team that helped us pull off this extraordinary feat, they are all gifted indeed!
We absolutely look forward to doing it again next year and expanding our understanding and impacting patient lives now; everything we do begins with and is for the patient. Thank you for being the true heroes of this quest for new cures!
Truly,
Stacy Fry, ALK Program Manager, (JTARI)
Angel Qin, MD, Clinical lead and co-PI of JTARI
Sofia D. Merajver, MD, PhD, Scientific Lead and co-PI of JTARI