Company decodes cancers to target treatment

November 3, 2011 | Source: Technology Review
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Foundation Medicine has developed a diagnostic test for cancer that reads the genome sequence of hundreds of cancer-linked genes. The results help oncologists pick the best drugs for that patient. (Credit: Foundation Medicine)

Foundation Medicine has developed a diagnostic test to read the entire sequence of hundreds of cancer-linked genes, at the forefront of a growing trend in cancer: choosing drugs based on the genetic profile of a patient’s tumor cells.

A number of pharmaceutical companies are using the test in clinical trials of new drugs and to direct patients into specific studies of drugs designed to target different mutations. And if researchers collect multiple tumor samples from the same patient over time, they can use the test to understand how the tumor evolves and try to predict why one person’s tumor might recur more quickly than another’s.