A new era of cancer treatments

Scientists have predicted that we could soon be entering a new era of “personalised” cancer treatment – significantly boosting survival rates. The premise of personalised, or “precision”, treatments is that, at a genetic level, cancers are not all the same, even when in the same tissue, so drugs that work for one won’t work for another. Some breast cancer patients already receive targeted treatments – Herceptin, for example: this works on the 25% or so of women with Her2positive breast cancer.

At the conference of the American Society of Clinical Oncology last week, specialists suggested that in future all patients could get their tumours genetically profiled. This would ensure they were treated with drugs known to combat their particular mutation – and were spared gruelling rounds of ineffective chemotherapy. “It is about targeting the treatment so that it is more powerful, while reducing the toxicity, so there are fewer side effects,” said Roy Herbst, of the Yale Cancer Centre.

Though cost is an issue, the effectiveness of using precision medicine was highlighted by a University of California study which found that in clinical trials, such treatments led to a tumour shrinkage of 30.6% on average; the shrinkage after “one size fits all” treatments was 4.9%. Separately, scientists at the Sanger Institute in Cambridgeshire announced they have charted the genes involved in acute myeloid leukaemia, a vicious form of the blood cancer. They found it is not a single disease but at least 11 different disorders – and that these can be targeted with remarkable accuracy.