Medical Oncologist Chosen for Clinical Trial Development Workshop

Abhishek Tripathi, M.D.

Medical Oncologist Chosen for Clinical Trial Development Workshop

A medical oncologist at Stephenson Cancer Center was one of only 25 faculty members in North America selected to attend a prestigious workshop in clinical trial development.

The result is that Abhishek Tripathi, M.D., returned to Oklahoma with a fully vetted clinical trial that will soon begin enrolling patients to test a new combination drug therapy for the treatment of metastatic bladder cancer. Tripathi is an assistant professor in the Department of Medicine.

The workshop was organized by the American Society of Clinical Oncology and the American Association for Cancer Research. To compete for a spot in the workshop, Tripathi developed his own clinical trial concept and secured funding to conduct it, a process that took a year. After a rigorous selection process, his was among the concepts chosen.

The value of the workshop is that Tripathi worked with senior physicians, scientists and biostatisticians with decades of experience designing clinical trials. Their feedback helped

him fine-tune the trial so that it would have the best chance of approval from the Food and Drug Administration. The workshop also included the input of patient advocates, who provided an important vantage point about the trial, such as how often patients would be required to come to the clinic, frequency of blood draws and number of treatments.

The clinical trial will test the effectiveness of an existing immunotherapy medication, avelumab, combined with an investigational new drug. The new drug has already shown promise, by itself, in shrinking tumors in patients with ovarian cancer, Tripathi said. In his trial, the hope is that the new drug will work in concert with the immunotherapy drug to further stimulate the immune system to shrink and control the tumor cells in bladder cancer. The trial will be held at multiple sites around the United States, and Tripathi will serve as the national principal investigator over the entire trial.