Micrograph of pancreatic ductal adenocarcinomaWIKIMEDIA, KGHFor patients with pancreatic cancer, the wait for a personalized treatment based on genomic data may be too long to be practical, according to a study presented today (April 20) at the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) meeting in Philadelphia, and published concurrently in AACR’s Clinical Cancer Research. The experience reflects the practical challenges of precision medicine studies, said study coauthor Andrew Biankin, director of the Wolfson Wohl Cancer Research Centre at the University of Glasgow.
“The science is the easy part,” Biankin told The Scientist. “The science will work out. But the clinical systems just aren’t there to do this properly.”
As part of a small clinical study, Biankin and his colleagues had set out to offer pancreatic cancer patients personalized therapies by sequencing their tumors in search of a variety of genetic alterations that would dictate an appropriate drug. Outlooks for these patients are particularly bleak: 95 percent die within five years of diagnosis.
Although Biankin’s team received the genetic results roughly three weeks after obtaining consent from patients, none of the consenting patients eligible for personalized treatments were available to complete the study. Among the 22 patients who had a positive hit on the genetic screen, six had ...
_Case_01.jpg){kind=link}