Personalized Medicine

With the exception of resistance mutations, somatic alterations in circulating tumor (ct) DNA (ie, a liquid biopsy) are consistent with alterations found in tissue biopsies of patients with advanced solid tumors, said Philip C. Mack, PhD, Director of Molecular Pharmacology, University of California Davis Comprehensive Cancer Center, Sacramento, at the 2016 American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) annual meeting.

A “liquid biopsy” was able to detect 2 mutations in the ESR1 gene that predicted worse overall survival (OS) in women with estrogen receptor (ER)-positive metastatic breast cancer who were originally enrolled in the phase 3 BOLERO-2 clinical trial, according to results presented at the 2015 San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium.

Women with clinicopathologic high-risk breast cancer had nearly a 50% reduction in prescription chemotherapy, with no increased risk for metastatic recurrence when a cancer gene-based assay was used to guide treatment decision-­making, according to new data presented at the 2016 American Association for Cancer Research meeting.

Assessing quality care in the age of precision medicine can be challenging. In a special session at the 2016 Quality Care Symposium, various stakeholders presented their perspectives on the challenges and opportunities related to quality care in this rapidly changing landscape.

A new biomarker can identify the subgroup of class 1 uveal melanomas that are most likely to metastasize, according to a new retrospective study (Field MG, et al. Clin Cancer Res. 2016;22:1234-1242).

Differences in 3 recently identified molecular factors in patients with metastatic renal-cell carcinoma (RCC) may explain the inferior survival rates in African-American ­patients versus in Caucasian patients, even in the age of targeted therapy.

The oral, investigational, small-molecule BCL-2 inhibitor venetoclax has shown excellent and durable responses in patients with relapsed or refractory chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL). All patients in the trial harbored the 17p deletion (del 17p), which signals poor prognosis.