“Life finds a way,” is the famous line uttered by Jeff Goldblum’s character in the original Jurassic Park film. While the statement is true, it is also unfortunate when it applies to cancer cells. When a targeted therapy blocks a pathway that enables tumors to grow, the cancer cells usually…

We have heard for years that personalized medicine is the wave of the future—tailored drug doses and combination specific to patient’s diseases and body chemistry. Now, a team of bioengineers and surgeons from UCLA schools of dentistry, engineering, and medicine may have taken medicine an important step closer to that…

Breast cancer is the most common cancer in women, and current screening approaches have resulted in earlier diagnosis. Although over half of women diagnosed with breast cancer have disease localized to the primary site [61%: Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) 18 2005–2011, All Races, Females by SEER Summary Stage…

Scientists at the University of Colorado Cancer Center published a study (“IMPACT: A Whole-Exome Sequencing Analysis Pipeline for Integrating Molecular Profiles with Actionable Therapeutics in Clinical Samples”) in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association (JAMIA) that describes a new tool that interprets the raw data of whole exome tumor sequencing and…

It’s not an either/or situation. Both DNA sequencing and RNA sequencing hold clinical promise—diagnostically, prognostically, and therapeutically. It must be said, however, that RNA sequencing reflects the dynamic nature of gene expression, shifting with the vagaries of health and disease. Also, RNA sequencing captures more biochemical complexity, in the sense…

A blood test may be able to sound early warning bells that patients with advanced melanoma skin cancer are relapsing, according to a study (“Application of Sequencing, Liquid Biopsies and Patient-Derived Xenografts for Personalized Medicine in Melanoma”) published in Cancer Discovery. Scientists from the Cancer Research UK Manchester Institute studied…

More rigor, insists the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), must be shown by practically everyone who is working on biomarker tests for molecularly targeted therapies. Through a report announced on March 4, the NAS is calling for “common evidentiary standards” and better coordination of regulatory and reimbursement activities. The NAS…

For all its genetic diversity, a tumor may yet display some common elements, antigens that reflect the tumor’s early mutational history. If these common elements could be identified, they could be used to target practically all of the tumor’s cells for destruction, and not just tumor cells that happen to…

Researchers at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine discovered a biomarker that puts patients at a higher risk for metastasis of uveal melanoma, a type of eye cancer. Among uveal melanomas categorized as class 1, those with high levels of the biomarker PRAME mRNA were more likely to…

Clinical actionability, or the determination of whether clinical action should be taken based on heterogeneous information generated by cancer genomic analysis, remains a key challenge for scientists and clinicians. Rodrigo Dienstmann, M.D., et al., writing in Molecular Oncology in 2014 (“Standardized decision support in next generation sequencing reports of somatic…

Thermo Fisher Scientific plans to buy Affymetrix for $1.3 billion, in a deal the buyer said will strengthen its position in bioscience research tools and genetic analysis. The deal, announced Friday after the close of financial markets, expands Thermo Fisher’s offerings with Affymetrix’s technologies, designed to enable parallel and multiplex…

Medivation and NanoString Technologies have entered into a collaboration worth up to $22 million with Astellas Pharma to pursue a gene expression signature algorithm from Medivation and create a companion diagnostic assay using NanoString's nCounter® Dx Analysis System. NanoString will be responsible for developing and validating the diagnostic test, seeking regulatory…

Virtual tumors—computer simulations that incorporate a patient’s genomic information—can help personalize cancer care. They have already been used to predict patient responses to drug treatments. In particular, virtual tumors have identified which patients are likely to respond to checkpoint inhibitors, drugs meant to prevent cancers from overriding host immune checkpoints.…

Berkeley Lights, which focuses on opto-nanofluidic biosystems, signed an agreement with the Icahn Institute for Genomics and Multiscale Biology at Mount Sinai that provides early access to Berkeley Lights’ instrumentation incorporating its OptoSelect™ light technology for single-cell annotation and genomics in research applications. Scientists at Mount Sinai say are using…

Thermo Fisher Scientific said today it will partner with Novartis and Pfizer to develop and commercialize a companion diagnostic for non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) across multiple drug development programs. The value of the collaboration was not disclosed. The companion diagnostic will be a multimarker, universal next-generation sequencing (NGS) oncology…