Personalized medicine gets personal

Epithelial cancers are the most common malignancies, but immunotherapy development has been stymied because of the difficulty in identifying targets that are not expressed on normal tissues. A National Cancer Institute team has now used a next-generation sequencing approach to identify such rare mutations in one patient and determine which, if any, are recognized by the immune system. The team then developed an autologous cell therapy against one of the mutations that led to cancer regression and disease stabilization.¹

The researchers now need to show that the personalized method can provide similar results for unique mutations in other patients and that the approach can further be generalized to treat large numbers of patients...