Precision Medicine in Oncology®

Given the higher risk of breast and ovarian cancer in BRCA mutation carriers, should broader screening for the abnormality be implemented?

Population-based cancer screening using genetic sequencing technology is an idea worthy of careful consideration, but there are many challenges to implementing such a program.

Like all new ideas or technologies, rapidly occurring changes present both opportunities and challenges for everyone involved, including government, patients, payers and physicians.

Patricia M. LoRusso, DO, Associate Director of Innovative Medicine, Yale Cancer Center, discusses the Dream Team Melanoma trial, which is investigating using personalized medicine to treat non-V600E melanoma subtypes.

Eduardo Sotomayor, MD, the Susan and John Sykes Endowed Chair in Hematologic Malignancies at Moffitt Cancer Center, discusses how personalized medicine may eventually help with preventing cancer.

The FDA has granted a breakthrough therapy designation to rucaparib as a treatment for women with BRCA-mutated advanced ovarian cancer who have received at least two prior lines of platinum-based chemotherapy.

Patients with advanced cancers of the pancreas or prostate, or where progression to this state occurs later in the course of the illness, should have tumor or germline testing performed looking for the presence of a BRCA mutation.

Maurie Markman, MD, offers examples of clinical trials where the interpretation of study results is worthy of considerable additional discussion or where justification for the actual conduct of the study can be called into question.

Thomas J. Lynch, MD, director, Yale Cancer Center, Physician-in-Chief, Smilow Cancer Hospital at Yale-New Haven, writes about precision medicine in oncology.

Kevin B. Kim, MD, medical oncology, California Pacific Medical Center, discusses how treatment outcomes in melanoma have evolved over the last few years.

The Nobel Prize winning director of the National Cancer Institute, Harold Varmus, MD, has tendered his resignation to pursue research interests in New York.