Study Reveals Disparities in the Use of Germline Testing for Breast Cancer

Nicholas J. Roberts, chief medical officer, Ontada, discusses real-world research around the adoption of germline testing for breast cancer, and the testing gap in certain racial groups.

Transcript:

0:08 | Ontada does a lot of real-world evidence. We’re a data analytic technology company within McKesson, and one of the things we felt that we should offer the physicians and US Oncology Network, is the opportunity to do what we call investigator-initiated studies. So, over a year ago, we sent out a proposal to our physicians to see if they would want to come up with a study that addressed the issues of social determinants of health.

0:36 | As everyone I think now knows, not everyone gets access to care, there are a number of barriers to care. We felt it was important to address in different cancers, whether social determinants of health were playing a role in maybe being a barrier to getting the appropriate care. We ended up with 3 studies, and 2 of the studies are around the issue of triple-negative breast cancer.

1:01 | So, triple negative breast cancer is an aggressive breast cancer. It affects disproportionately women that are African American. And we want to see if there was the appropriate standard of care in their management. So, we identified a group of women that were at triple-negative breast cancer, and we asked 2 questions. One is related to what we call germline testing. That's testing to see if someone has an inherent risk for getting breast cancer. And it turns out that triple-negative breast cancer, there is a concern that that may be at play. We identified a group of women that included African Americans, and we identified that testing rates for germline testing. And we did find that overall, the group did very well 70% plus got germline testing, much higher than we would expect. Partly, that was because these patients were in practices that had a very active genetic screening program. But we did find that African American women were tested a bit less than White women.