What if you could hone in on the perfect treatment for cancer? A tailor-made therapy for your body and the type of cancer you might have? Precision oncology is a branch of cancer research that involves analyzing a patient’s tumor to detect genetic and chemical abnormalities. This information can help customize treatment plans with tailored therapeutics. Potentially due to the skewed sample, the authors detected 80 percent of the cancer drivers for colorectal, breast, lung, and ovarian cancers but less than 20 percent of drivers reported for liver and stomach cancers.
The research team found that around 55 percent of patients had at least one cancer driver genes that could be used to predict how the patient would respond to various treatments. Additionally, the research team found that “many genes function as drivers in several cancer types.” They found that 85 genes were cancer drivers in two or more cancerous tumor types, and 26 genes function as drivers in more than five tumor types.
“We believe [this study] represents one of the most comprehensive efforts thus far to identify cancer driver genes and serves as an important research asset,” the research team wrote. That effort could lead to better therapy. The researchers noted that their observations indicate that “approximately 15% of patients are potentially eligible for a currently approved therapy targeting an oncogenic driver.
” However, there are long-standing criticisms of precision oncology which may pr.