Targeted Treatments Show Mettle Against Advanc...( Progression-free survival longer when...),Health

Progression-free survival longer when treatment aimed at specific tumor traits

SUNDAY, April 19 (HealthDay News) -- Patients with a variety of advanced cancers who had been faring poorly on less finely tuned therapies did better when they received treatments that were targeted to their tumors' specific characteristics.

The findings, which were to be presented Sunday at the American Association for Cancer Research annual meeting, in Denver, fit into the current framework of "personalized" medicine, explained Dr. Minetta Liu, a translational researcher/breast oncologist at Georgetown University's Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center in Washington, D.C.

That, of course, means being able to predict which drugs will do best for a particular person's cancer. "In breast cancer in particular, we have a lot of therapeutic options, but we pick our drugs based on large clinical trials of hundreds of women, so we're not individualizing therapy," she explained. "The desire is to come up with better ways to predict who will respond to which drug."

For this study, Arizona researchers searched for molecular targets in 66 patients who had failed an average of five therapies for a variety of different cancers.

"Such patients would normally be offered a trial with a new [experimental] anti-cancer agent, [but] we used fairly standard techniques and looked for conventional targets for conventional agents. For example, for estrogen receptor-positive cancer, we would use an anti-estrogen agent," explained study senior author Dr. Daniel Von Hoff, physician-in-chief at TGen, a nonprofit research institute in Phoenix, and chief scientific officer at Scottsdale Healthcare and U.S. Oncology Research. "We treated them according to the best target they had."

Researchers actually found a target in 98 percent of the group. Eighteen patients saw a benefit in progression-free survival, compared to how they had done on previous
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