Michael Pellini fires up his computer and opens a report on a patient with a tumor of the salivary gland. The patient had surgery, but the cancer recurred. That's when a biopsy was sent to Foundation Medicine, the company that Pellini runs, for a detailed DNA study. Foundation deciphered some 200 genes with a known link to cancer and found what he calls "actionable" mutations in three of them. That is, each genetic defect is the target of anticancer drugs undergoing testing—though not for salivary tumors. Should the patient take one of them? "Without the DNA, no one would have thought to try these drugs," says Pellini.
Starting this spring, for about $5,000, any oncologist will be able to ship a sliver of tumor in a bar-coded package to Foundation's lab. Foundation will extract the DNA, sequence scores of cancer genes, and prepare a report to steer doctors and patients toward drugs, most still in early testing, that are known to target the cellular defects caused by the DNA errors the analysis turns up. Pellini says that about 70 percent of cases studied to date have yielded information that a doctor could act on—whether by prescribing a particular drug, stopping treatment with another, or enrolling the patient in a clinical trial.
To read the full, original article click on this link: Foundation Medicine: Personalizing Cancer Drugs - Technology Review
