A group of Boston physicians and researchers
has taken a crucial step toward personalized cancer treatment,
identifying novel drug combinations that show promise against cancer
cells that have developed a resistance to therapy.
The
technology is not yet ready for the ultimate test, in which the
promising drug combinations are given directly to patients. However, the
researchers saw tantalizing hints of the potential of the approach when
they grew a handful of the drug-resistant cancers in mice and observed
that in all cases, the new drug regimens were effective at shrinking
tumors.
“You could imagine in the future, maybe the
not-too-distant future, we could start to do this as clinical trials
where we would assign patients to treatments based on the results of
what their cancer cells showed susceptibility to,” said Dr. Jeffrey
Engelman, director of thoracic oncology at Massachusetts General
Hospital, who co-led the work published Thursday in the journal Science.
A revolution in medicine has made genetic testing of tumors almost
routine when selecting treatment for many types of cancer. However,
resistance to targeted therapy almost invariably develops and genetic
clues, though powerful, have not always been sufficient to identify the
best treatment.
That has spurred a range of efforts to
personalize treatment and monitor cancer’s evolution. This summer, a
Mass. General team showed that it was possible to isolate rare tumor cells circulating
in the blood and analyze them to understand how a patient’s cancer was
changing. Other researchers have been working on developing mouse avatars, in which a patient’s tumor is grown in a lab animal in which new therapies can be tested.
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