Cancer Care Needs Better Tests, Not Just More Drugs | Opinion
Summary
Cancer research has made great progress in creating new treatments, but it still struggles to choose the right patients for these treatments. Better tests and patient selection methods are needed to avoid giving powerful drugs to patients who will not benefit and to target those who will.Key Facts
- Cancer behaves differently in each patient, so not everyone responds the same way to a treatment.
- Current cancer research often focuses on whether a drug works on average, rather than who it works for.
- Precision medicine uses genomic and molecular tests to guide treatment decisions, like in the OPTIMA trial for breast cancer patients.
- Around 68% of patients in the OPTIMA trial could avoid chemotherapy without worse outcomes using better patient selection.
- Tumors are complex and involve DNA, RNA, and proteins, so tests using only a few biomarkers may miss important information.
- Giving treatments that won’t work can cause harmful side effects and wasted time for patients, especially those with advanced cancer.
- Ineffective treatments also waste money, hospital resources, and research opportunities.
- Experts call for patient selection to be part of drug development from the start and for better data collection to improve future treatment decisions.
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