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Genetic Linkage

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.

To continue reading go to DNA Science Blog at Public Library of Science, where this post first appeared. Read More 
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Celebrating Gleevec – and Basic Research

Peter Nowell and David Hungerford began the work that led to the successful cancer drug Gleevec (Penn Medicine)
When 23-year-old Glamour magazine editor Erin Zammett Ruddy went for a routine physical in November 2001, she expected reassurance that her healthy lifestyle had been keeping her well. After all, she felt great. What she got, a few days later, was a shock. Instead of having 4,000 to 10,000 white blood cells per milliliter of blood, she had more than 10 times that number – and many of the cells were cancerous.

Erin had chronic myeloid leukemia (CML). Two years before her diagnosis, CML was a death sentence. But the drug Gleevec saved her and many others. It offers perhaps the best example of translational medicine. Read More 
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