Opportunities to Meet Clinical Cardio-Oncology Needs With New Approaches to Non-Clinical Safety Assessment.

Progress in Pediatric Cardiology. 2014;36(1):31-32

Abstract:  Marked successes in treating a wide variety of malignancies in both adults and children have raised concerns about the cardiotoxic sequelae of several mainstream and emerging cancer therapies. There is a critical need for the health care community to more quickly and reliably identify the unique treatment-related cardiac risks facing patients with cancer. Meeting these needs will likely involve identifying new biomarkers of early and reversible cardiotoxicity, designing and optimizing dosing and drug selection, and developing oncology drugs that can be administered with protectant therapies to improve safety profiles. Non-clinical studies offer the opportunity to more thoroughly characterize underlying biological mechanisms that might aid in designing and optimizing safer drugs. The Health and Environmental Sciences Institute (HESI), a global, non-profit institute that promotes multi-sector scientific partnerships along with other academic, government, patient-advocacy, and clinical partners, proposes to develop novel collaborations to develop new ways of performing non-clinical safety assessments that will benefit patient quality of life.

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