Personalised cancer treatment on the way
- 19 November 2008 by Linda Geddes
- Magazine issue 2682. Subscribe and save
- For similar stories, visit the Cancer and Genetics Topic Guides
IT IS usually impossible to tell whether someone's cancer will respond to therapy. That could change with the discovery of a genetic signature that predicts whether a variety of cancers will respond to the most common treatments. This could help identify which patients need drugs and radiotherapy, and which can be treated less aggressively. Andy Minn at the University of Chicago and his colleagues discovered that many cancers show abnormalities in 49 genes, collectively known as the IFN-related DNA damage resistance signature (IRDS).
They then analysed 34 different cancer cell lines and several hundred primary human cancers. The IRDS was associated with resistance to radiotherapy among the cell lines from certain cancers, while in breast cancer patients it correctly predicted which cancers would be resistant to radiotherapy and drugs that work by causing DNA damage in dividing cells - although not other cancer drugs (Proceedings of the ...
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