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It's becoming routine for cancer doctors to order a detailed genetic test of a patient's tumor to help guide treatment, but often those results are ambiguous. Researchers writing in Science Translational Medicine Wednesday say there's a way to make these expensive tests more useful.
Here's the issue: These genomic tests scan hundreds or even thousands of genes looking for mutations that cause or promote cancer growth. In the process, they uncover many mutations that scientists simply don't know how to interpret — some may be harmless.
"What we found is, you essentially get a lot of inaccurate information," says Dr. Victor Velculescu, a professor of oncology and pathology and co-director of cancer biology at the Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center.
The consequences of misinterpreting these results could be significant.
"You can imagine patients being placed on a particular therapy, with all the side effects of that therapy but without any of the benefits," Velculescu says. "You can imagine that it prevents the patient from getting the right therapy. And then, finally, there are the additional costs of...