HJBR Jan/Feb 2022

HEALTHCARE JOURNAL OF BATON ROUGE I  JAN / FEB 2022 19 MBP continued... to operate three, by forming one of the most unique public-private partnerships the state or LSU has to build a medical physics pro- gram that has a master’s component, a PhD component and a residency program that’s competing with programs across the world — all of those things have happened in the last 20 years and, guess what, it’s driven oth- ers to be better. We have seen that across the landscape and healthcare, that rising tide of competi- tion has driven more resources to be avail- able to cancer patients. It would be impos- sible for any organization, be it Ochsner or FMOL or Mary Bird or the Baton Rouge General or Woman’s Hospital, to take care of all the cancer patients. All of us need to be better, and when we make an invest- ment that drives people to be better, awe- some; when another organization makes an investment that makes us want to be better, guess who wins? Patients. You’re spot on, and we’re excited about the future. We’ve got some really, really exciting opportunities with our new partner, OneO- ncology, that brings scale to Louisiana that hasn’t existed before, in particular in the area of clinical research. Clinical research is what drives cancer care forward for the future generations, and we are in an incredi- ble phase of clinical research. Back when the human genome got mapped, since then, sci- entists have started identifying bio markers, and those biomarkers and the genetic infor- mation about tumor construction leads to drug development so that the drugs, rather than these systemic drugs that you just give to a patient and hope it works, drugs that are being developed today and have recently been developed are targeted to specific cell abnormalities and cell construction to turn off receptors, to stop cancers from grow- ing or to embolden the immune system to attack cancers. That research, as far along as it has come, is at the beginning. Being part of the OneO- ncology network where there’s, I think, 30,000 new patients we’re seeing across the OneOncology network last year, and the ability of the research group of OneO- ncology, which we will be a big part of, to identify avenues in what’s called molecular tumor boards and then work on research projects that target patient populations that will benefit from this research as it evolves, is going to be an incredible opportunity to bring here into Louisiana. Those research “protocols,” as they are called, wouldn’t be available to us unless we were part of that network. In addition to our NCI relationship that we have with LSU Health Science Center and the relationships that we have with certain pharmaceutical companies that bring clinical trials to us, we’re now going to have and be a huge part of a network that’s driving molecular-based research so that, for example, patient comes in, they’ve identified that there’s a potential drug combination that will improve care for that patient, you check their molecular bio- markers, they qualify, that clinical research study’s set up, you talk to the patient about it and it’s demonstrated to them and they decide that that’s what they want to do. They’ll have an opportunity to participate not only in care that will be state-of-the- art for them, but it may provide information that will help future generations of patients. That’s really exciting to us. I think more and more organizations are going to start linking up their cancer care profile to bigger and bigger scale, because if we see 5,000 new patients a year, let’s say that a certain percentage of those have breast cancer, but breast cancer is a ton of different types — there’s hormone-negative, hormone-positive, HER2-negative — so we might identify through a molecular study out there that this particular type of breast cancer responds well to these particular combinations of agents or new drugs, but we might not have enough patients in our care network to really demonstrate how to make a difference. Being part of OneO- ncology in that much broader network, those studies will be made available to that broader network to benefit the patients here and everywhere else in the network. So, things that we couldn’t do for ourselves or that pharma wouldn’t be interested in bringing to us, because we don’t have the scale of patients, will now be available to us, because OneOncology has scale through what’s called OneR, which is their research network. There are so many exciting things that are going to continue to develop across the relationships that we have with our local partners, LSU A&M, LSU Health Science Center, the hospital partners that we work with, our relationship with OneOncology and the new relationships we’ll make in the future. So, yeah, bravo for your conclusion, because it’s spot on. Editor: I’d like to provide some context for some of the providers that might not under- stand the history of what brought OLOL and Mary Bird Perkins together in the first place. Howdid you both operate, and howdid that evolve over the years? Stevens: We originally located on Woman’s Hospital’s campus in 1971. Then, in the early ‘80s —maybe ‘83 to ‘85 — the board decided to relocate fromWoman’s to here. The deci- sion to relocate largely had to do with can- cer care at that time in the ‘70s. It was really just kind of getting started, and it started to evolve. Woman’s hospital was organized to care for women, and the Mary Bird facility was caring for women and men, and it just made more sense to be on a tertiary hospi- tal campus. The decision was made to move here to the campus of Our Lady of the Lake. That transition happened in the mid-1980s and, ostensibly, Mary Bird Perkins Can- cer Center just located on the campus and operated independent fromOur Lady of the Lake. It operated its radiation therapy and other programs that it ran at the time. And then, as cancer care started to evolve — you could think of cancer care really in three buckets. It’s infusion, which is chemo- therapy, surgery and radiation — as science evolved and the ability to care for patients evolved, more and more times, those com- binations were being used together instead of just chemotherapy or just surgery. They were getting so good at all of them that they could be more aggressive and use combina- tion therapy: chemo, radiation and surgery. Some services were provided by the Lake, some services were provided by Mary Bird,