New biomarkers are the key to personalized cancer drugs

Joseph Nevins, director of the of the Duke Institute for Genome Sciences and Policy's Center for Applied Genomics & Technology, believes it's time to radically change the way that cancer drugs are developed if we expect to see a new generation of personalized therapies. Because of the complexity of cancer--breast cancer, he speculates, could be broken down into 15 different types of cancers--tissue samples should be collected from all patients going through clinical trials so that more effective biomarkers can be developed to match a new treatment with a patient.

"People worry that this would greatly slow the progress of clinical trials. But we're arguing that it doesn't do any good to do faster trials when we're not helping patients," Nevins notes. He adds that pharma developers or the National Cancer Institute will bear the added cost. And he cites two specific cases in which investigators collected biopsies from every patient enrolled, Scientific American reports.

"Conducting trials that evaluate drugs in unselected populations of patients, knowing that only a very small fraction of these patients will actually benefit from the drug, is a practice that should stop," write Nevins and his colleagues in a commentary published April 21 in Science Translational Medicine. "We owe it to the patients, and to all of us who potentially will be patients, to change this practice if we are to make meaningful gains in implementing effective cancer therapy and winning the war on cancer."

• here's the story from Scientific American - access the commentary here (subscription req.)