Genetic tests in clinic fall short for prescribing best cancer therapy

Many cancer patients in clinics across the United States might be getting inaccurate information from DNA analyses that are intended to match them with the most effective therapy.

The finding, published in Science Translational Medicine on April 15, comes as companies are increasingly focused on churning out drugs that target specific cancer-causing mutations. Demand for tumour sequencing has soared as physicians try to find the treatment best suited to combat a patient’s particular set of tumour mutations.

But many clinics sequence only the tumour DNA and do not compare those sequences to DNA taken from a patient’s normal tissue. Omitting that crucial control erodes precision in gauging which mutations are important for treating a particular cancer, says Victor Velculescu, a cancer biologist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, and lead author of the study.

It can also confound clinical-trial results when investigators try to match treatment response to genetic profiles.

“There is a rush to do this clinically and apply it to patient treatment without thinking about what the best control is,” says Velculescu. “You could use that information to place patients on inappropriate therapy.

“The reality is you can’t have precision medicine without having precision genomics. And you can’t expect to put patients on the right therapy if you can’t correctly analyse the tumour. It’s just not going to work.”

Read full, original article: Cancer mutations often misidentified in the clinic

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