New cancer trial focuses on individual patients

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In a new cancer trial, oncologists in the US will prescribe treatment based on the genetic mutations of a patient’s cancer, not the type of cancer itself.

National Cancer Institute (NCI), based in the US, announced the trial at the American Society of Clinical Oncology annual meeting in Chicago.

“This is really the first time in a very large way that patients will be screened for mutation irrespective of the site of origin of their tumour,” NCI deputy director James Doroshow said.

“And feed it with a drug that is presumed to be effective against that particularly molecular change.”

NCI said the trial would involve around 1,000 patients who have cancer in advanced stages and who have already tried standard treatments such as chemotherapy.

They will either be given experimental drugs not available on the market, or medicine approved by the US Food and Drugs Administration (FDA) that is currently used for other purposes.

Dr Doroshow said they expected to find new mutations that have never been described before in diseases.

“What we don’t know is how well this approach will work in terms of defining which therapy is best; what we are quite sure about is that we will be obtaining new tumour biopsies prior to the initiation of treatment,” he said.

“We will very likely find out a great deal about how, when drugs don’t work and why they don’t work.

“Because we will be doing a very deep larger analysis of all these tumours that we screen.”

The trial is described as a form of “precision medicine” in which therapies and preventative measures are more tailored to the individual patient.

Researchers say the trial will help determine some of the benefits of precision medicine for cancer patients.

“This is one of the first trials to try and discover if this is a good approach,” Dr Doroshow said.

“I don’t think it will yet define that this is unequivocally the best approach, but I think we will learn a great deal [about] how to do these genetically based research programs.

“Then from there [we can] understand in what circumstances this approach is actually better or perhaps not better than the current approaches.”