2024 INTREPID Kingscliff Meeting

Dr. Cun (Lizzy) Liu, alongside Daniel Sheen and Mackenzie Bourke, attended the annual meeting for the INTREPID project, funded by a NHMRC Synergy Grant for breast and prostate cancer prevention and early detection. The grant is led by Prof. Melissa Southey from Monash University. During the meeting, Lizzy, Daniel and Mac presented updates on the health economics aspects of this project.

Dr Lizzy Liu presented the progress on developing a discrete choice experiment (DCE) aimed at understanding preferences for population-based breast cancer genomic risk screening. She also facilitated a group discussion with INREPID researchers-including precision cancer epidemiologists, functional genomicists, clinicians and implementation scientists-to refine the labelling of the key characteristics of the genomic risk screening program.

Daniel presented an update on the findings from a systematic review of patient and research participants preferences for additional findings from genomic testing. Following that he provided an update on the development and recruitment of focus groups to develop an understanding of the preferences for the return of additional findings of cancer risk from research in the Australian context. These focus groups were contextualised as exploring the differences and similarities of preferences across the general public and medical genomics research participants and inform the development of a discrete choice experiment (DCE) on the same topic.

Mackenzie presented the preliminary results from his systematic review investigating the cost-effectiveness of genomic medicine throughout the cancer care continuum. The presentation discussed the current understanding of the cost-effectiveness of population genomic screening for breast and prostate cancer, as well as some of the limitations of the current methods in this space.