Personalized Medicine

Atlanta, GA—Patients with cancer treated with pelvic radiation did not have fewer bouts of diarrhea when treated prophylactically with the anti-inflammatory drug sulfasalazine (Azulfidine), a randomized trial showed. Patients receiving sulfasalazine had radiation-associated severe diarrhea almost 3 times as often as patients receiving placebo.

Amsterdam, The Netherlands—Expanded radiotherapy led to significantly better disease-free survival (DFS) and metastasis-free survival (MFS) rates in women with early breast cancer, according to the results of a large study reported at the European Cancer Congress 2013.

Boston, MA—Next-generation sequencing is a valuable tool to identify actionable genomic alterations that may be present in a tumor sample, said Gary A. Palmer, MD, JD, MBA, MPH, Senior Vice President of Medical Affairs and Commercial Development, Foundation Medicine, Cambridge, MA, at the Second Glob­al Biomarkers Consortium annual conference.

Boston, MA—Incorporating personalized medicine into everyday oncology clinical practice will require new paradigms in an effort to match patients with cancer with the appropriate therapies, as well as attempts to treat solid tumors at an earlier stage with targeted agents, said Razelle Kurzrock, MD, Director, Center for Personalized Cancer Therapy, University of California, San Diego (UCSD) Moores Cancer Center, at the Second Global Biomarkers Consortium annual conference.

Diagnosing lung cancer by swabbing a patient’s nose may be possible in the not-too-distant future. Changes in nasal gene expression in patients with lung cancer have been found to correlate with changes in gene expression in the bronchus, opening the door to the possibility of nasal gene expression as an early diagnostic biomarker of lung cancer, said Avrum Spira, MD, MSc, Director, Translational Bioinformatics Program, Boston University Clinical and Translational Science Institute.

Boston, MA—Defining optimal therapeutic efficacy in the genomic era will require that clinical trial design in oncology move from a drug-centric approach to a patient-centric one. Retrofitting current knowledge into old paradigms will slow the progress in discovering effective targeted agents, said Razelle Kurzrock, MD, Director, Center for Personalized Therapy and Clinical Trials, Moores Cancer Center, University of California, San Diego, at the Global Biomarkers Consortium Second Annual Conference.

Testing for KRAS mutations is recommended to guide treatment decisions in patients with metastatic colorectal cancer (CRC) by pointing to the patients who would most likely benefit from anti–epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) therapies.

New York, NY—To paraphrase Winston Churchill, “we are at the end of the beginning” of the era of clinical genomics in acute myeloid leukemia (AML), said Richard M. Stone, MD, Clinical Director, Adult Leukemia Program, Dana-Farber Cancer Insti­tute, Boston, at the 2013 National Comprehensive Cancer Network congress on hematologic malignancies.

Niagara Falls, Ontario—Research­ers have determined that 18F-fluoro­deoxyglucose (FDG) positron emission tomography (FDG-PET), a widely available and relatively inexpensive imaging modality, could be used to shape treatment plans for patients who have been diagnosed with high Gleason score prostate cancer.