Every year, the Cancer Community Award, sponsored by AstraZeneca, presents an individual or organization with the Cadillus for Precision Medicine Award.

This award celebrates those who enhance the ability to provide the right treatment for the right patient at the right time.

In 2021, Dr. Colin Pritchert received the award for his work as the Program Director for Cancer Precision Diagnostics

for the Broadman-Bady Institute for Precision Medicine of the University of Washington.

As we've prepared for this year's awards, we reconnected with Dr. Pritchert to hear more about what's happened since he received the award.

Dr. Colin Pritchert, thank you so much for joining me today. I'm excited to hear more about what you've been up to in the past year.

Yeah, me too. I'm excited to talk to you.

First, if you could just explain what you do, tell me how you explain it to people who are not in your field, who don't have any science background, how do you break down the work that you do?

So I specialize in making genetic lab tests for cancer patients that look at multiple genes at once.

We like to make the tests from scratch, do the research that identifies where the tests are useful for cancer patients, and then actually implement those tests in the clinical lab that I'd co-direct for use in cancer patients.

So my role is kind of along that entire spectrum, doing the research that provides the basis for the test, developing and validating the test for clinical use, implementing that test to be used for cancer patients.

And then day-to-day interpreting the results from those tests, writing reports that go into those patient records so that they get their lab results. So I do all of those pieces.

So basically what you're doing is you're doing genetic testing on someone's cancer, and by looking at the DNA, you're able to learn more about the best way to treat that cancer, is that right?

That's right. There's a variety of tests that we use to help cancer patients, but the mainstay of the types of tests we use are the ones where what we're doing is we're actually testing the tumor tissue, and we're looking for what DNA changes have happened, mutations in that cancer.

And based on what is unique to your specific cancer, we can then sometimes make good decisions about what the best treatment is.

So that's the precision part of it, or the personalized medicine.

We're really tailoring or targeting a treatment, not just because you have this type of cancer, or you're at this stage of cancer, but we're really tailoring it to your specific cancer.

We're testing it and saying the way your cancer developed with this exact mutations, here's probably what we think is going to be the best treatment for you.

We're lucky now that there are so many of these targeted treatments that are sort of gene associated, so that gives us a lot to choose from on the shelf.

So what got you interested in this field of study? Why did you decide to go into this work?

I think a real kind of seminal moment for me was in my second year of med school.

There was a lecture by Steven Friend.

...