Super-drugs designed to target common gene faults in cancers may have wildly varying effects depending on the type of disease, British researchers report today.
Researchers said there were "stark" biological differences in the way different types of tumour respond to these drugs.
The findings suggest that single "cures for cancer" will continue to prove elusive – but may also mean that some innovative drugs have been abandoned too early when they were found ineffective against cancers, the researchers say.
The latest study involved 30 different cancer cell types from bowel, lung and pancreatic tumours, analysed at the Institute of Cancer Research, London, UK.
The researchers studied the impact of drugs that block the gene PI3K. They found that bowel cancer cells were less likely than lung cancer cells to respond to the drug pictilisib and block this gene.
The findings are published in Molecular Cancer Therapeutics today.
Researcher Professor Udai Banerji said: “We found that cells from different cancers responded quite differently to drugs targeting the same genetic faults – suggesting that if someone’s tumour has a particular genetic fault, we can’t automatically assume that a drug targeting that fault will work for them.
“Our new study suggests that we need to take cancer type into account when designing clinical trials testing the benefit of treatments targeting specific genetic changes – and that we no longer group people participating in clinical trials by the genetic faults in their tumour alone.
“What’s exciting is that we could now look back at targeted drugs that failed before making it into the clinic, to see if any existing treatments could offer benefit to people with other cancers than the tumour types in which they were originally trialled.”
Institute chief executive Professor Paul Workman added: “This new study brings nuance to the paradigm of precision medicine and shows that the story isn’t quite as straightforward as matching a drug to a cancer’s genetics.
“If we can understand better how targeting the same gene can have different effects depending on the tumour type, it can help us to predict more accurately how individual patients will respond to treatment.”
Molecular Cancer Therapeutics 2 July 2019
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