Precision Medicine in Oncology®

With the rapid pace of change in precision medicine, insurance companies and federal policymakers are going to have to adjust for far more variance in the ways patients are treated, even though insurance plans and federal policy by nature require a measure of standardization.

Mark R. Gilbert, MD, senior investigator, chief, Neuro-Oncology Branch, National Cancer Institute, Center for Cancer Research, discusses the use of precision medicine in treating patients with glioblastoma.

The deployment of precision medicine to develop safe and effective therapies to treat malignant brain tumors is an effort that poses both opportunities and challenges.

Jason Luke, MD, Assistant Professor of Medicine, the University of Chicago Medicine Comprehensive Cancer Center, discusses how inflammation in the tumor microenvironment can serve as a biomarker in melanoma.

The FDA has requested additional clinical trial data to support a new drug application for rociletinib as a potential therapy for pretreated patients with EGFR T790M mutation-positive NSCLC.

The FDA has granted an accelerated approval to osimertinib for patients with advanced EGFR T790M mutation positive non–small cell lung cancer following prior therapy on a prior EGFR TKI.

Geoffrey R. Oxnard, MD, Assistant Professor of Medicine, Harvard Medical School, Dana Farber Cancer Institute, discusses how to define resistance to EGFR-inhibitors in lung cancer.

Treatment of patients with non–small cell lung cancer should be based on the identification of rare molecular targets such as BRAF, RET, ROS1, and MET versus clinical characteristics.

Less than a decade after the FDA set the ground rules for developing assays that pair molecular targets with new drugs, experts say there have been strides in personalizing anticancer therapies but that many hurdles remain before next-generation sequencing and other precision medicine advances are incorporated into the diagnostic paradigm.

Pazopanib demonstrated significant clinical activity for patients with RAI-refractory differentiated thyroid cancer; however, a predictive biomarker for the therapy could not be uncovered.