Tumor tracking gets personal
Bringing genomics to cancer care
By Eva Emerson
SAN DIEGO – A new way to identify cancer’s genetic scrambling may allow doctors to better monitor how individual patients respond to treatment and detect a recurrence of a tumor.
Wholesale juggling of chunks of DNA is common in cancer cells, but cataloging those changes hasn’t been easy. Now, a small study of colorectal and breast tumor cells shows that these genetic rearrangements can be reliably identified. Unlike with some other types of cancer, these genetic changes are unique to each individual’s tumor. While that individuality may stymie efforts to design therapies to target these rearrangements, their presence alone can be useful as a marker of cancer’s waxing and waning, scientists said during a news briefing February 18 at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
The team’s new technique to rapidly identify such rearrangements from individual tumors offers doctors a potentially powerful way to track tumor activity in patients. The research is scheduled to appear in the Feb. 24 issue of Science Translational Medicine
In a commentary in the same issue, Ludmila Prokunina-Olsson and Stephen Chanock of the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Md., call the new study a proof-of-principle “that lays an important foundation,” but caution that some issues still need to be worked out before the next-generation method used in the study becomes a “this-generation” medical tool.