Matching Cancer Patients to Targeted Drugs: Two New Tools

A choreography of mutational events drives cancer cells to invade and metastasize, changing the biology in ways that enable the errant cells to resist treatments. While the traditional slash-and-burn approaches of chemotherapy and radiation attack rapidly-dividing cells, targeted treatments zero in on the altered proteins that reflect precise genetic changes in tumor cells. These are the somatic (�body�) mutations in just the affected cells, not the inherited mutations present in all of a patient�s cells.

Two new papers introduce tools to better match patients to targeted treatments or immunotherapies, based on interpreting the mutations behind a cancer�s initiation and spread. One is a machine learning tool called Cerebro, the other a scale for physicians to rank the evidence that a particular targeted treatment will work against a tumor with specific mutations.

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