Cancer: Highly Personalized Therapy Can Improve Outcomes

Recently, precision medicine has been gaining ground as a potentially more effective approach to treating a range of stubborn conditions and diseases, including many forms of cancer.

With this type of approach, researchers aim to better anticipate which types of treatments would best suit an individual, depending on their genetic makeup and the environmental and lifestyle factors that are relevant to them.

A new study — the findings of which appear in the journal Nature Medicine — now suggests that further personalizing precision medicine may be useful in treating cancers that do not respond to commonly prescribed therapies.

The researchers, many of whom are from the University of California, San Diego, in La Jolla, conducted a clinical trial to test whether personalized combination therapy can have a positive effect in people with refractory tumors. These are tumors that did not respond to previous treatment.

In order to find the best combination therapy match, they analyzed the participants’ specific tumormutations and tried to target them individually.

“Response rates to therapies that target one alteration can be low and not durable,” notes first author Dr. Jason K. Sicklick. “Our approach went beyond targeting a single alteration. In collaboration with a multispecialty team of oncology experts, we formulated a personalized combination therapy for each patient,” he explains. – Business Today