Eirik Joakim Tranvåg

The new era of personalized cancer diagnostics and therapy: seeking new roles for age and biomarkers in clinical decision making

This PhD project is uniquely positioned at the intersection between medical ethics, priority setting, and biomedical and clinical cancer research, and will engage into one of modern medicines most controversial and polemic issues: setting priorities for new precision medicines for advanced and incurable cancer. Precision medicines and targeted therapy for cancer have showed great promise, but have also created new challenges for priority setting in health. Two important personal characteristics are patient age and expression of potential biomarkers, and to utilize such features when tailoring treatment for individual patients can increase benefit and reduce side effects.

However, little is known about how clinical decision-makers actually perceive and use such individual patient characteristics when allocating new and expensive cancer drugs. Our project seeks to fill this gap and the potential benefit is large: At a clinical level, proper use of age and biomarkers in the decision making process will help tailor treatment for each individual patient and it will also assist physicians in their daily clinical work. At an administrative level, our findings will guide and inform the priority setting process at hospitals and among health authorities. At a national level, the work in this project will link naturally up to some of the Norwegian health systems biggest challenges and public debates.