Clinical Oncology News - Targeted Therapy: Not All Mutations Are Created Equal

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Clinical Oncology News 


Future Challenges

As investigators embrace a personalized medicine approach to cancer care, they can glean a fuller picture of what aberrations drive cancer and how to combat them.
“We can characterize the patient, tumor and tumor environment in a way we’ve never been able to do before,” Dr. Mills said.
However, there are still major challenges in this area. Even after identifying relevant aberrations and useful biomarkers, the scope of this knowledge remains limited.
“For patients with a particular biomarker, only subpopulations benefit and the responses are usually short,” Dr. Mills said. “I think that’s one of the things we forget to emphasize—we’re seeing remarkable steps forward, but they’re usually measured in months, not years and certainly not in cures.”
Dr. Markman stressed, “We need to dramatically change the paradigm for drug development. The idea that we should continue to do clinical trials to help a few we don’t understand is not sustainable or rational and it’s got to stop. This strategy costs tens of millions of dollars per trial to give a benefit of a few weeks, maybe months.”
He added: “The future of research is looking at individual patients, collecting data in these patients worldwide, making info available to doctors and insurers, and figuring out how to do this quickly and less expensively. Although there’s been lots of talk of change, I’ve seen no action yet.”