Unraveling Cancer Genetic Profiles May Lead to Personalized Chemotherapy

Cancer researchers seeking to devise methods for "personalized” chemotherapy have developed a high-throughput genotyping system that allowed them to obtain accurate, sensitive, and cost-effective cancer gene mutation profiles.

Investigators led by a group at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute (Boston, MA, USA) adapted a high-throughput genotyping technique to query 238 known oncogene mutations across 1,000 human tumor samples. This approach established mutation distributions spanning 17 cancer types. Of 17 oncogenes analyzed, 14 had mutated at least once, and 298 (30%) samples carried at least one mutation. The findings, which were published in the February 11, 2007, online edition of Nature Genetics, represent an important step toward the era of "personalized medicine,” in which cancer therapy will be guided by the particular set of genetic mutations within each patient's tumor.

"It is universally recognized that cancer is a disease of the genome, of mutations within genes responsible for cell growth and survival, and a great deal of effort has gone into finding those mutations, to the point where several hundred to a thousand are now known,” said senior author, Dr. Levi Garraway, a medical oncologist at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. "The challenge has been how to determine which of them are involved in each of the hundreds of kinds of cancer that occur in humans--and to develop accurate, affordable methods of detecting key mutations in tumor samples.”
"We have shown the practical potential of this technique,” said Dr. Garraway. "It is a step toward the day when cancer patients will routinely have their tumors scanned for specific mutations, and treatment will be based on the cancer's particular genetic profile.”



Related Links:
Dana-Faber Cancer Institute