Leveraging RWD to Improve Reporting in Oncology

In a recent video interview with Applied Clinical Trials, C.K. Wang, MD, chief medical officer, COTA, discussed a recent study he led on leveraging real-world data (RWD) to improve oncology reporting. Additionally, Wang highlighted recent trends and challenges in the oncology research space involving the use of RWD as well as real-world evidence (RWE).

ACT: Could you give our audience an overview of the recent study you led on leveraging RWD to improve reporting in oncology?

Wang: To start, COTA is an oncology real-world data company, and our data is clinical and comes from the actual medical record systems for our provider partners, and over the past six years, we have built large, ready to use databases across both blood cancers and solid tumors. I will say that two foundational components to when one is looking to use any real-world data set is to understand, number one, whether or not it is actually accurate, whether that you know that the data that you see is actually accurate, but more importantly is to understand how complete that data is. As we all know, in clinical trials, especially in oncology, overall survival remains the gold standard by which any new therapy is actually being looked at. The completeness of the mortality data, whether it be in the clinical trials or in real-world data, remains extremely important. This is exactly what we set out to do in our study. We looked at, across all of our hematologic cancer databases, and we compare the accuracy and the completeness of our composite mortality variable against the national death index, which is the gold standard death database as we know it today.