Hopes and predictions for 2022

Gastroenterologist Dr. Rachel Issaka, whose research focuses on colorectal cancer screening, is also looking forward to getting more people screened in the new year. 

“I think screening starting at 45 is really going to be the lead. 2022 is when insurance companies have to begin covering it. It usually begins with Medicare and then other insurance plans follow suit,” Issaka said at Fred Hutch’s Nov. 30 Science Says virtual event. “And so I think we will learn how we will engage people who are between the ages of 45 and 50 in completing screening."  

She added: “And, hopefully, what we learn can be applied to the entire population, because one in three adults over 50 has not completed screening yet. We have to do a better job overall, and I think the 40- to 49-year-olds will hopefully push us to do better for everyone.”

Getting screened for cancers such as colorectal, breast and cervical when eligible is one step people can take to take more control of their health. Another is to get more exercise, eat healthy foods and quit tobacco. Psychologist Dr. Jonathan Bricker, who develops and tests new ways to help people change behaviors that affect their health, hopes that all of us use the new year to make more healthy choices.  

“As the COVID virus's evolving behavior will continue to impact global health in 2022, it is more imperative than ever we each work to control our own health behavior through exercise, diet and tobacco cessation,” he said.

He shared two ongoing studies his team is conducting that could help.

“Our WeLNES research project welcomes people who want to lose weight," Bricker said. "And our quit2heal research project welcomes cancer patients who want to quit smoking.”

Cancer treatment

In recent years, advances in cancer treatment, such as targeted drugs and immunotherapies, have led to better survival for people with a range of cancers. Fred Hutch researchers foresee more progress in 2022.

Imaging can be an important tool in cancer care for making sure a patient is getting the right treatment. Biostatistician Dr. Ruth Etzioni says that as we enter 2022, “cancer imaging is having a moment and we will all need to start learning a lot more about radiology if we want to keep up with the inevitable consequences for staging and treatment.”

Etzioni, whose research focuses on cancer screening and early detection, cites new PET scans that show more clearly and easily sites of metastasis, or cancer spread, in people with prostate cancer. In a positron emission tomography or PET scan, a dye containing a radioactive substance is infused into the body, where a scanner detects it, ultimately yielding 3D images showing the functioning of particular organs and tissues. 

There are several new types of PET scan for prostate cancer, Etzioni says, and they are "leading to dramatic upstaging and changes in treatment recommendations in newly diagnosed and recurrent cases. … My prediction is that this is going to be something that becomes available for other cancers too, if not already. The technology is there.” 

Dr. Robert Bradley sees progress toward new types of cancer drugs that harness RNA, a cousin of DNA, that is created as cells interpret the information stored in their DNA. Like changes in DNA, changes in RNA can drive cancer. Bradley's recent laboratory work has suggested that drugs designed to disrupt RNA or RNA processing could be potential avenues for treatment, and he sees the larger scientific field moving this way, too. 

“I predict that RNA will become an increasingly transformative technology for creating new cancer therapies — developing RNA-based cancer vaccines, using RNA itself as medicine and creating new drugs that alter RNA metabolism within cancer cells,” Bradley said.

Bender Ignacio is medical director of the COVID-19 Clinical Research Center at Fred Hutch, which is conducting clinical trials of investigational treatments for people with, or at high risk for, COVID-19 or long-haul COVID-19. Learn more about the studies the CCRC is enrolling and what it’s like to participate.

Drug combinations, specifically, are needed in the new year to treat people with COVID-19 and other viral illnesses, wrote infectious disease physician and math modeler Dr. Joshua Schiffer, Bender Ignacio and colleagues in a perspective published Dec. 21 in the journal mBio. The development of combination treatments in the new year will increase efficacy of treatment, limit toxicity and avoid the development of drug resistance, they wrote.

Virologist Dr. Julie Overbaugh, too, is looking ahead at treatments for the COVID-19 virus in 2022 — and looking out for a different deadly pandemic virus. 

Computational biologist Dr. Trevor Bedford anticipates being able to gain important insights in 2022 from the study of people's relatively well-defined COVID-19 vaccination and infection histories that could inform the design of future vaccines for other diseases, such as flu. Much of his work before COVID-19 involved tracking flu as it spread and evolved to help inform the tricky work of designing yearly flu vaccines. 

“We’ll be able to understand more about how you make a vaccine that targets specific strains that are circulating,” Bedford said. 

Neither flu, nor HIV, nor SARS-CoV-2 are diseases of one particular country or continent. The more connected the world becomes, the more our viruses will circulate throughout all humanity.  

Perhaps, Overbaugh concludes, next will be the year we finally realize what we need to do. 

“I truly hope that 2022 is a year where the U.S. and other first-world countries take a global perspective on the pandemic, recognizing this is an infectious disease that will be with us for some time,” she said, “and that we are in this together."