Genomic Testing

July 21, 2020

A pathogenic germline mutation rate of about 5% has been identified in women who had a family history of breast or ovarian cancer but no personal history of either disease.

July 10, 2020

Jennifer Marie Suga, MD, discusses how the results from next-generation sequencing tests are assessed to help physicians manage their patients in real-time.

June 01, 2020

Jennifer Marie Suga, MD, discusses implementing a genomic oncology program at Kaiser Permanente Northern California through large-scale genomic next generation sequencing testing of patients with advanced cancers in the community setting.

March 17, 2020

In an interview with Targeted Oncology, Carl Morrison, MD, DVM, senior vice president Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center, discussed the rationale for evaluating the Ion Torrent-based approach to predicting response to immunotherapy. He highlighted the importance of this in the clinical setting and advances are necessary to further validate this as a biomarker of response.

March 11, 2020

Microsatellite instability has been an FDA-indicated biomarker for immunotherapy since 2017, when the PD-1 inhibitor pembrolizumab was approved for patients with solid tumors found to be mismatch repair deficient or MSI high. Other approvals since then, such as for the combination of ipilimumab and nivolumab in patients with MSI-H/dMMR metastatic colorectal can­cer, have established the relevance of cancer thera­pies for tumors with this biomarker specifically rather than tumor histology alone.

March 10, 2020

In an interview with Targeted Oncology, Whitney Ducaine, MGC, CGC, CN-BM, discussed the evolution of genetic testing in oncology. She highlighted the importance of having conversations with genetic counselors to help inform the patient on their familial risks as well to help inform treatment decisions.

March 06, 2020

Julie R. Brahmer, MD, discusses the role of molecular testing for patients with lung cancer and why this is particularly important for those with early-stage disease.

February 28, 2020

High volumes of mutations observed through liquid biopsies may be associated with an improvement in progression-free survival and clinical benefit after first-line standard-of-care pembrolizumab-based therapy in patients with metastatic non-small cell lung cancer, according to findings from a prospective biomarker trial conducted by investigators at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine and Abramson Cancer Center, which were published in Clinical Cancer Research.

February 22, 2020

Treatment with immune checkpoint inhibitors appears to elicit limited clinical activity in patients with osteosarcoma. In a study, investigators at MD Anderson Cancer Center found that certain factors like poor infiltration of the tumor by immune cells, low activity from available T cells, a lack of immune-stimulating neoantigens, and multiple immune-suppressing pathways may interfere with response to immunotherapy in these patients, according to a press release from the organization.

February 11, 2020

Next-generation sequencing in patients with chronic lymphocytic leukemia treated with the combination of chlorambucil and ofatumumab showed that the presence of TP53, SF3B1, and NOTCH1 mutations were predictive of reduced efficacy, according to the results of the phase III COMPLEMENT1 trial published in Haematologica.