Molecular tumor boards, they’ve really been popping up everywhere across the nation, especially at the NCI-designated cancer institutions, and we’re at a crossroads in medicine, where we have probably whittled down most of the molecular aberrations to the most common ones. What we have left are this smattering of 3% or 4% molecular aberrations amongst a bunch of cancers.
With the advent of next-generation sequencing coming out, and turnaround times being one week, two weeks and sometimes six weeks, for whole genome sequencing, we’re able to not treat a cancer just like a breast cancer or colon cancer, but look more at the molecular level and provide more tools for the tool chest by looking for genomic aberrations, and helping triage patients to maybe drugs we normally wouldn’t use in a breast cancer, or a clinical trial that might be more unique to their specific cancer, more precise...
Molecular tumor boards, they’ve really been popping up everywhere across the nation, especially at the NCI-designated cancer institutions, and we’re at a crossroads in medicine, where we have probably whittled down most of the molecular aberrations to the most common ones. What we have left are this smattering of 3% or 4% molecular aberrations amongst a bunch of cancers.
With the advent of next-generation sequencing coming out, and turnaround times being one week, two weeks and sometimes six weeks, for whole genome sequencing, we’re able to not treat a cancer just like a breast cancer or colon cancer, but look more at the molecular level and provide more tools for the tool chest by looking for genomic aberrations, and helping triage patients to maybe drugs we normally wouldn’t use in a breast cancer, or a clinical trial that might be more unique to their specific cancer, more precise.
I think the largest area of unmet need with tumor boards is probably clinical trials, we need more clinical trials to help guide the therapy for these patients, it’s one thing to continue to do things with off-label drugs, but we need a much more curated way of following the data, being able to predict which patients are going to benefit, rather than just help triage them to therapy, we need more of a systemic approach to really organize and collate our data.
