Precision Medicine Approach May Expand Therapeutic Options for Patients Ovarian Cancer and Us OVARIAN CANCER and US Ovarian Cancer and Us

Blog Archives: Nov 2004 - present

#ovariancancers



Special items: Ovarian Cancer and Us blog best viewed in Firefox

Search This Blog

Monday, June 06, 2016

Precision Medicine Approach May Expand Therapeutic Options for Patients



asco news
 June 4, 2016

ASCO Perspective
“This study speaks to the incredible potential of precision medicine to help us identify new treatments, but it also underscores the need to explore this genomic-based testing and treatment approach in a learning environment, like a clinical trial,” said Sumanta Kumar Pal, MD, ASCO expert in developmental therapeutics. “It’s likely there are factors that we are not yet aware of that explain why certain patients benefit from targeted therapies while others don’t, even when their tumors have the same abnormality. We need to find these answers so we can match more patients to potentially beneficial treatments and spare patients from treatment that is unlikely to improve or prolong their lives.”
CHICAGO – Researchers reported encouraging early results from a phase II trial that matches patients with molecular abnormalities in the tumor to corresponding targeted treatments. Twenty-nine of 129 patients with 12 different types of advanced cancers responded to drugs outside of FDA-approved indications. The promising responses seen in four tumor types with specific molecular alterations has already led to expansion of these tumor cohorts to additional participants.
The study will be featured in a press briefing today and presented at the 2016 American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) Annual Meeting.
“With genomic testing of tumors becoming increasingly available, studies such as ours will help more patients benefit from precision medicine approaches,” said lead study author John D. Hainsworth, MD, senior investigator at Sarah Cannon Research Institute in Nashville, TN. “Although it is still early to draw conclusions, our findings suggest that, for example, HER2-targeted therapy could be expanded beyond the current indications of HER2-positive breast and gastric cancers. Our study gives strong early signals for activity of HER2-targeted therapy in HER2-amplified colorectal cancers (those with extra copies of HER2 gene), and possibly other HER2-positive cancers.”
About the Study
MyPathway is an ongoing non-randomized, open-label trial that evaluates four treatment regimens in patients with advanced cancer for whom no beneficial treatment is available. This is a nationwide study with 39 currently participating sites.
To be eligible for the study, patients must have had previous molecular studies of the cancer showing abnormalities in the HER2, BRAF, Hedgehog or EGFR pathways. Patients were then matched with drugs targeting those abnormalities...

0 comments :

Post a Comment

Your comments?

Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.