BioCentury
ARTICLE | Tools & Techniques

Drivers' Ed

Improvements in tumor genome diagnostics could help precision medicine.

April 30, 2015 7:00 AM UTC

The goal of precision medicine in cancer is to find the mutation that drives the tumor and treat it based on the target's mechanism. But two independent studies from The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and the Francis Crick Institute suggest it isn't as simple as sequencing the tumor and identifying the genomic changes. To separate cancer drivers from passenger mutations that cause no pathology, normal tissue needs to be sequenced too, and tumor subpopulations should be analyzed over time.

The findings could have implications for companies such as Foundation Medicine Inc. that use tumor-only sequence analyses to identify mutations to guide treatment decisions. However, the researchers emphasized in their study and to BioCentury their focus is on optimizing methods in a rapidly moving field, rather than on changing how cancer treatments are chosen in clinical practice immediately. Foundation was not available for comment...