Precision Medicine in Oncology®

Hailed as "new ammunition in the war against cancer" and featured in TIME magazine at the turn of the new millennium, molecularly targeted therapies have gone on to revolutionize cancer treatment. Clinical responses, however, are all too often short-lived as cancer cells become resistant.

Women harboring a loss-of-function mutation in the PALB2 gene demonstrated an increased risk of developing breast cancer that was similar to the predisposition seen with mutations in the infamous BRCA gene

Nobody disputes the need for careful, judicious diagnostic testing. But as the number of individual gene tests continues to grow, clinicians are struggling to keep up. On the one hand, using diagnostic markers like KRAS in colon cancer or hormone receptor status in breast cancer to select the most appropriate chemotherapy regimen is essential.

Third generation EGFR TKIs have demonstrated dramatic benefits for patients with non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) and should be considered as a standard second-line option following resistance to frontline therapy

Fred R. Hirsch, MD, PhD Professor of Medicine and Pathology, Associate Director for International Programs, University of Colorado Cancer Center, discusses the role of next-generation EGFR inhibitors.

For many years, we in the medical and research communities have tried to use proteins and DNA fragments as disease markers to find cancer early.

Results of an early-phase study have shown the combination of afatinib (Gilotrif) and cetuximab (Erbitux) has utility in EGFR-mutant lung cancer patients who have developed resistance to gefitinib (Tarceva) and erlotinib (Iressa).