Posted by Michael Wonder on 15 Apr 2018
Cutting-edge cancer drug hobbled by diagnostic test confusion
9 April 2018 - Physicians struggle to identify which patients are likely to respond to a recently approved therapy.
A landmark cancer drug approved last year seemed to herald a long-anticipated change in the treatment of some tumours: with medicines selected on the basis of molecular markers, rather than the tissue in which the cancer first took root.
But clinicians and researchers are struggling to put that theory into practice. Although the drug itself works well in a variety of tumour types, some of the tests used to identify the molecular markers, it turns out, do not.
