OMD-ZH: The CCCZ Oligometastatic Disease Program

Keywords

Oligometastatic Disease, Radiomics, Liquid Biopsy, Immunophenotyping, Decision Support System

Overview

This CCCZ flagship project OMDZH aims to advance our clinical and biological understanding of oligometastatic disease and thereby improve patient selection and the design of personalized treatment strategies. Specifically, we aim to improve imaging- and tissue-based identification of oligometastatic cancer patients, who achieve a long-term survival benefit of definitive local therapy. Additionally, we aim to improve early response assessment by liquid-biopsy and develop a patient decision support system based on patient reported outcomes measures (PROMS) for designing a personalized systemic treatment strategy.

Aims

Aim 1 will use computational methods for quantitative analysis of longitudinal radiological images to describe the disease burden and its temporal dynamic more precisely. Aim 2 will perform compari-sons of matched pair tumor specimens of the resected primary tumor and metastases using targeted sequencing, as well as immunological and digital spatial profiling to investigate intra-patient cancer heterogeneity as novel prognostic and predictive marker. Aim 3 will use liquid biopsies before and after definitive local therapy to quantitatively assess response not only radiologically but on a molecu-lar level within the systemic compartment. Lastly, aim 4 will develop and evaluate patient decision support systems to complement the currently limited evidence about the optimal patient-specific systemic treatment strategy.

OMDZH will analyze oligometastatic lung cancer, head-and-neck cancer, and prostate cancer and therefore include large patient cohorts. Simultaneously, we will en-sure that the methodologies will be disease-agnostic, which will enable transfer of our experiences to other cancer entities, where we are facing similar challenges. Our strong track record in design & conduct of clinical trials and international leadership in the field of OMD research will be essential for prospective validation of our findings.

Graphical abstract of OMD-ZH work packages

Principal investigator and departments

Matthias Guckenberger, Department of Radiation Oncology, University of Zurich, University Hospital Zurich, Matthias.Guckenberger@usz.ch

Isabelle Schmitt-Opitz, Department of Thoracic Surgery, University of Zurich, University Hospital Zurich, Isabelle.Schmitt-Opitz@usz.ch

Burkhard Becher, University of Zurich, Institute of Experimental Immunology, becher@immunology.uzh.ch

Nikola Biller-Andorno, Institute of Biomedical Ethics and History of Medicine,University of Zurich, biller-andorno@ibme.uzh.ch