Heidelberg, Germany/Kawasaki, Japan, October 27, 2023 – St. Marianna University School of Medicine in Kawasaki, Japan, will utilize MH Guide to personalize cancer treatment. The agreement between University School of Medicine and Molecular Health resulted from a preceding study partnership.
The MH Guide system has been previously implemented at St. Marianna University Hospital, and a proof-of-concept was conducted for cancer gene panel testing. It was reported at the JSMO (Japanese Society of Medical Oncology) annual meeting in February 2022 that the implementation of the system is shown to be feasible in routine clinical setting [Sunakawa Y. et al., JSMO 2022 (P38-6)].
MH Guide will now be routinely employed with oncology expert panels at St. Marianna University Hospital to annotate the cancer gene panel testing of patients with solid tumors. Yu Sunakawa, Professor and Chair in the Department of Clinical Oncology at St. Marianna University School of Medicine, and Director of the Oncology Center at St. Marianna University Hospital, stated that they now have a complete precision medicine ecosystem that enables them to provide world-class cancer care, thanks to their comprehensive cancer genome profiling and MH Guide. Professor Sunakawa emphasized that the introduction of a genome-guided decision support system for variant annotation and interpretation in expert panels in Japan is expected to lower the workload of doctors and staff while increasing the quality of annotation.
Molecular Health has a long history of supporting molecular tumor boards and expert panels with its clinical decision support software MH Guide. It has become a dependable partner for implementing precision oncology in clinical practice.
Molecular Health’s Head of Medical Affairs and Marketing, Marc-Alexander Rauschendorf, PhD, summarizes that molecular tumor boards typically comprise medical professionals from diverse fields with expert knowledge in oncology, pathology, and molecular diagnostics. Their role is to ensure interdisciplinary consensus after the molecular pathological diagnostics have been completed. An individual therapy concept is developed based on the detected molecular genetic findings present in the patient’s tumor profile. To achieve this, a comprehensive analysis of all genetic changes is conducted, and if necessary, supplemented with additional analyses to identify crucial factors, called drivers, responsible for the progression of the tumor and to determine points of therapeutic initiation. The objective of a molecular tumor board is also to consider and if meaningful enable nonstandard therapies to be evaluated in the framework with e.g., clinical trials.
MH Guide is an analytical software that assists molecular pathologists and oncologists in interpreting NGS data from molecular tumor profiling and taking evidence-based treatment decisions. The software automatically identifies clinically significant genetic variants from molecular data and reports treatment options based on the patient’s molecular profile as well as ongoing clinical trials that may be relevant. To achieve this, MH Guide matches molecular patient data with data from the knowledge platform Dataome, a sizable comprehensive database owned by Molecular Health. Consequently, MH Guide becomes an evidence-based decision support tool that helps physicians and molecular pathologists to keep up with the rapidly growing stock of medical knowledge and administer actionable diagnosis and treatment to their patients.
About St. Marianna University School of Medicine and St. Marianna University Hospital
Established in 1971, St. Marianna University School of Medicine is a private university located in the city of Kawasaki, Japan. St. Marianna University Hospital operates as a multi-specialty teaching hospital with 955 beds. It is the biggest among the four hospitals administrated by St Marianna University School of Medicine and a hub hospital for cancer genome medicine in Japan. The hospital has 34 clinical departments that utilize advanced medical systems to offer state-of-the-art medical care in a wide range of medical specialties. The medical oncologists in Department of Clinical Oncology manage cancer treatment using genomic tests.
Website: https://www.marianna-u.ac.jp/