Personalised Medicine is improving patient outcomes

Evidence supporting the benefits of precision and personalised medicine over existing therapies in advanced cancer is growing.
The Moores Cancer Center in San Diego, USA, has recently shared data highlighting that patients survived longer when receiving personalised cancer therapy. Moores’ Center for Personalized Cancer Therapy offered guidance to physicians regarding their molecular tumour makeup to help design strategies for treatment with precision medicine approaches. Specifically, those patients who had their tumour makeup assessed were able to access specific therapies based on their genome, leading to better outcomes.

The 3-year survival rates for patients who received the standard therapy in the study was 25%. Those receiving personalised treatment plans saw a 3-years survival rate rise to 55%.

The team used next-generation sequencing (NGS) to identify novel cancer targets. The technique is not new and has previously led researchers to potential cancer treatments. Treatment with NGS-identified medicines, however, hasn’t yet proved a panacea, as many patients’ cancers can be complex and develop resistance to even seemingly targeted therapies Optimized treatment with a personalised or combinatorial approach offers patients some further hope. By applying a multidisciplinary approach to build a molecular tumour board (MTB) of geneticists, bioinformaticians, physicians and experts from a range of disciplines, The MTB, leveraging biomarker data with clinical trial coordinators, was able to match potential therapies to patients whose genetic differences were suitable, with the resultant beneficial outcomes. The MTB-based therapies were also linked to the degree of matching, with the matching a predictor of the improved patient outcomes.