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Feds Hunt 'Biomarkers' for Cancer Treatment (AP)
Tue Feb 14th 2006 at 4:20 pm ET
WASHINGTON - Three government agencies unveiled a project Tuesday to discover biological markers that predict which cancer patients will respond best to which treatments, who may relapse — and whether experimental therapies are likely to work. So-called biomarkers already are used in a variety of diseases to determine whether a patient should stick with one therapy or try another, and to speed drug development.But while scientists have discovered many potentially useful biomarkers, even the few in use today aren't fully understood. A shrinking tumor, for instance, doesn't necessarily predict longer survival. The Food and Drug Administration sometimes approves new drugs based on such promising signs, but is supposed to force manufacturers to track patients in longer studies to be sure they truly benefit.On the other hand, it's not always a bad sign if a tumor doesn't appear to shrink quickly; cells inside the tumor may be dying, but the X-rays typically used to measure can't see that.In the project announced Tuesday, the FDA, National Cancer Institute and Medicare will collaborate to find better biomarkers for cancer, or better ways to measure and use them.First on the list is non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. A study will measure whether a special type of PET scan — FDG-PET, which measures cellular metabolism — can predict very early whether a patient is responding to treatment.Reader Comments
Well, at least it is a start for these organizations.
The single most neglected area of cancer research has been the development of methods and technologies to be matchmakers between individual cancer with individual cancer treatment. The single most neglected area of cancer treatment has been the unwillingness to utilize, or even study, the matchmaker technologies which have already been developed and which are already available.
The only problem with this is, currently, you give the patient drugs and wait three weeks and then give more drugs and then wait three weeks, and then repeat tumor measurements. The “new” program is to develop tests which could be performed a few days to a week or so after treatment and give some indication of whether or not the treatment was likely to work.
But you’d still have the patient getting potentially toxic and ineffective treatment and then you’d still have to wait weeks until you could try Plan B. They measure the drug effects on tumors in the patient (one treatment at a time), rather than in the laboratory (cell culture assay tests) where as many as twenty treatments can be done to see which one works best.