Reimagining How We Treat Cancer

Through her work at Magee-Womens, Dr. Sarah Taylor is transforming cancer care delivery and patient experiences, with the goal of putting more life in the years of women facing cancer.

“It’s All About Identifying the Biomarker”: Building A New Model for Cancer Screening & Testing

“Particularly in the world of ovarian cancer, we see certain mutations, or pathogenic variants, to help guide therapeutic decision-making. There are important biomarkers that help to make patients potentially eligible for certain types of drugs.”

Dr. Taylor explains that every single patient diagnosed with ovarian cancer should have germline genetic testing to identify whether they have a pathogenic variant that could be passed from generation to generation — with the most common being BRCA1 and 2.

“Once we diagnose one of these, we need to ensure family members are informed so they can be tested and take any necessary risk reduction and prevention strategies. Most of these pathogenic variants usually lead to increased risk for multiple types of cancer. It’s all about identifying that biomarker — for therapeutics, but also because it helps us understand and hopefully prevent the disease.”

In collaboration with Dr. Shannon Rush, Dr. Phuong Mai, and Dr. Emilia Diego, Dr. Taylor oversees a clinic that identifies patients who have a pathogenic variant but don't have a personal history of cancer.

These patients can see all three of these specialties in one clinic: breast, gynecologic, and overall cancer screening — a completely new way of serving patients through genetic testing.

“They’re Comfortable Here.”: Expanding Patient Participation in Clinical Research Trials from their Home Base

In partnering with the Immunotherapy and Drug Development Center at UPMC Hillman Cancer Center, Dr. Taylor helps patients enroll in clinical trials without leaving their home base and familiar care team at UPMC Magee-Womens Hospital.

“They want to stay at Magee because they're comfortable here; they know the nurses and staff,” she says.

Typically, patients in clinical trials are organized by disease site (e.g., breast, gynecologic, lung). However, by collaborating with other teams to develop a model that spanned multiple disease sites, Dr. Taylor helped patients access research participation opportunities that were previously unavailable to them.

“It helps build our pipeline because we have phenomenal translational scientists in the lab doing great preclinical work to find targets to bring to the clinical realm. My job is to act as that bridge between preclinical scientists and the clinic and help write those clinical trials to get them open, running, and enrolling patients.”

Design students work with hospital staff, and patients use gaming to get to some of the hard questions around identifying the resources patients need, ensuring every patient asks the right questions at the right time.

Dr. Taylor and her staff participated in a series of design thinking workshops—ultimately framing design challenges for the interdisciplinary course at CMU.

“How many cancer researchers are working with design professors?”: Reimagining Cancer Care & Supporting Survivors

“A lot of things that happen in cancer care overlap. Because when we take care of individuals with cancer, we're taking care of human beings. We’re not just treating cancer — cancer impacts every part of our lives: physical, emotional, psychological, and financial ... it impacts the people who take care of them. Everything.”

As cancer treatments extend the lives of those facing the disease, physician-scientists like Dr. Taylor are helping think more comprehensively about what cancer care and survivorship look like.

“It really has to be, ‘How do we take care of you from head to toe?’” she explains. “What do we do from a nutrition standpoint? From a physical functioning standpoint? A psychological and emotional support standpoint? How do we support the people who care for you? Because if they're not supported, then they can't help you get through your cancer journey.”

In collaboration with a professor of design at Carnegie Mellon University, Kristin Hughes, Duquesne University professor, Dr. Grace Campbell, and the University of Pittsburgh School of Nursing’s Dr. Heidi Donovan, Dr. Taylor assembled individuals from the office: physicians, nurses, PAs, front desk staff, social workers, administrators, palliative care professionals, among others, to discuss the barriers to care faced by patients.

Together, they identified five themes that became the pillars of an interdisciplinary design class at CMU.

“We gave the design students these five prompts and said ‘OK, you problem solve. You people outside of medicine come into the clinic, observe, talk to patients, talk to caregivers, talk to the medical professionals, and use your design brains right to reimagine this. And then we're taking that as a jumping-off point, right to say, ‘How do we make this actually happen?’”

To Dr. Taylor, their team is marrying what happens in the design world with what happens in the medical world to reimagine this experience. The goal is to take this concept into large, randomized control trials around cancer care delivery.

“We’re intimately integrating research questions into the day-to-day workings of every single patient that sets foot into our clinic, so we make sure to get an accurate needs assessment for patients then and at every point of care because your needs change over time depending on where you are in your cancer journey.”

Reflecting on her work, Dr. Taylor says we must rethink the way we provide cancer care by looking at it from different angles. She credits her success to the strength found in her colleagues and partnerships.

“The closeness of the collaborations, the longstanding nature of them, and the willingness to think outside the box and make sure that all important stakeholders are involved makes us uniquely positioned to be successful because of the community that exists here.”