Lancastria.net Yea Blackburn!

NHS patients are to be offered personalised cancer treatment under a pilot scheme to carry out genetic tests on individuals’ tumours.

Cancer Research UK hope that the project will analyse the tumours of up to 6,000 patients a year for a range of genetic defects.

The results will guide doctors in choosing the most effective therapy for that patient.

The charity predicts such tests could become routine within five years.

Due to be launched in the autumn, the project will examine how best to roll out genetic testing across the NHS.

In the past few years about two dozen targeted cancer drugs that attack specific genetic mutations have been developed, such as Herceptin for breast cancers with defective HER2 genes. They are effective, however, only when a certain mutation is present, so tumours must be tested first.

At present, NHS provision of these tests is patchy, and few patients are tested for more than one mutation. The Cancer Research UK scheme will change this by establishing some six centres that test tumours systematically for multiple mutations.

Patients whose cancers appear similar can then be divided into genetic subgroups with different treatment strategies. Lung cancers, for example, can be driven by different mutations, such as EGFR and BRAF. A patient with an EGFR defect could be prescribed erlotinib, an EGFR inhibitor, while one who tests positive for BRAF could join a trial of PLX4032, an experimental drug that targets this mutation.

Cancer Research UK has set up a scientific advisory panel to decide which types of cancer to include in the pilot and which mutations to test for. A team led by James Peach, the charity’s director of stratified medicine, is examining similar initiatives that are already running in the United States. At Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, every patient admitted with late stage lung, breast, gastrointestinal, brain and melanoma skin cancer is now tested for mutations in 13 genes, to guide treatment decisions.

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