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Precision Medicine is Changing the Way We Think About Cancer
Charting a path for precision medicine through the lens of non-small cell lung cancer
Having spent nearly 30 years working in the field of lung cancer, I have seen how advances in genomic profiling, a key element in precision medicine, have led to some amazing success stories.
A patient named Mary
In 2014, a patient named Mary was diagnosed with advanced non-small cell lung cancer. She was only 57 years old and had never smoked cigarettes. After testing negative for all of the clinical guideline-recommended biomarkers that could match her with an FDA-approved targeted therapy, she believed chemotherapy was her only option. Then a friend told her about the FoundationOne® comprehensive genomic profiling test that analyzes more than 300 cancer-related genes using a single tissue sample.
Her FoundationOne report revealed a MET exon 14 splice-site mutation. At that time, the MET-inhibitor crizotinib was still being studied in a Phase I trial, and because of her genomic alterations, she was able to enter the study. Within 48 hours her cough subsided, and a CT scan one month later showed her cancer had shrunk by 75 percent.
