Something for RAC to play around with…one day?SummaryFunctional...

Something for RAC to play around with…one day?


Summary

Functional precision medicine is a strategy whereby live tumor cells from affected individuals are directly perturbed with drugs to provide immediately translatable, personalized information to guide therapy. The heterogeneity of human cancer has led to the realization that personalized approaches are needed to improve treatment outcomes. Precision oncology has traditionally used static features of the tumor to dictate which therapies should be used. Static features can include expression of key targets or genomic analysis of mutations to identify therapeutically targetable “drivers.” Although a surprisingly small proportion of individuals derive clinical benefit from the static approach, functional precision medicine can provide additional information regarding tumor vulnerabilities. We discuss emerging technologies for functional precision medicine as well as limitations and challenges in using these assays in the clinical trials that will be necessary to determine whether functional precision medicine can improve outcomes and eventually become a standard tool in clinical oncology.

Keywords

• Precision medicine
• functional precision medicine
• precision oncology
• patient-derived models

Introduction

Targeted cancer therapies are capable of inhibiting specific oncogenic proteins. Many of these targeted therapies are administered following a positive companion diagnostic predicting therapy outcomes. For example, the presence of HER2 amplification in breast cancer predicts response to HER2-targeted therapy, and mutation of EGFR in lung cancer predicts response to EGFR-targeted therapeutic agents. The success of several targeted therapies, along with a comprehensive understanding of molecular diversity in cancer, gave rise to the tantalizing idea that cancer therapy could be personalized, leading to the concept of precision oncology. Precision oncology is an approach where properties specific to an individual’s tumor are used to direct effective therapy. Indeed, precision oncology has been conducted for decades in some types of cancer (e.g., hormone therapy in estrogen receptor-positive breast cancer and imatinib in Philadelphia chromosome-positive leukemia). The field has expanded vastly since several large cancer genome projects (

Hudson et al., 2010) revealed common molecular features of tumors that could be targeted. This perspective describes how precision oncology can be augmented by functional approaches to help realize the promise of personalized cancer treatment.

link to article:

https://www.cell.com/cancer-cell/fulltext/S1535-6108(21)00616-4?rss=yes&utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter#.Yd-1kztT6XQ.twitter