Journal Article

Functional precision cancer medicine—moving beyond pure genomics

Letai, Anthony

2017

Overview

Anthony Letai proposes wider adoption of functional assays in efforts to match the right drug to the right patient and discusses why these assays might be complementary to existing genomics-based approaches. The essential job of precision medicine is to match the right drugs to the right patients. In cancer, precision medicine has been nearly synonymous with genomics. However, sobering recent studies have generally shown that most patients with cancer who receive genomic testing do not benefit from a genomic precision medicine strategy. Although some call the entire project of precision cancer medicine into question, I suggest instead that the tools employed must be broadened. Instead of relying exclusively on big data measurements of initial conditions, we should also acquire highly actionable functional information by perturbing—for example, with cancer therapies—viable primary tumor cells from patients with cancer.

• Publisher: Nature Publishing Group US,Nature Publishing Group
• Subject: 692/699/67/1059/602 / Antineoplastic agents / Biomedicine / Cancer / Cancer genetics / Cancer Research / Complications and side effects / Data management / Development and progression / Dosage and administration / Drug therapy / Genetic aspects / Genomics / Health aspects / Humans / Infectious Diseases / Initial conditions / Medicine / Metabolic Diseases / Molecular Medicine / Molecular Targeted Therapy - methods / Neoplasms - genetics / Neoplasms - therapy / Neurosciences / Patients / perspective / Physicians / Physiological aspects / Precision Medicine / Spheroids, Cellular / Targeted cancer therapy / Treatment Outcome / Tumor cells / Tumor Cells, Cultured / Xenograft Model Antitumor Assays