Cancer advances: Dr. William G. Nelson discusses genome sequencing and immunotherapy

 Dr. William G. Nelson is the director of the Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center, in Baltimore, MD, and a professor of oncology. In this article, he discusses two rapidly developing approaches to cancer treatment: Genome sequencing and immunotherapy.

Dr. Nelson is also the editor-in-chief of Cancer Today, the magazine of the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR). What follows is a lightly edited version of Dr. Nelson’s response when we asked him which areas of cancer research he was most excited about. He particularly focuses on data presented at this year’s AACR Annual Meeting, held virtually.

Cancer medicine is in the midst of a fast-paced transformation that is starting to produce clear improvements in disease outcomes, with cancer death rates down 27%Trusted Source over the past 20 years.

Some of the decline in cancer deaths can be attributed to smoking cessation and some to the broader adoption of established cancer screening approaches, but innovations arising from cancer research have really started to impact cancer care.

Genome sequencing

Researchers have long known that all cancers fundamentally arise as a consequence of acquired defects in genes and in gene function that propel rogue cells in the body to replicate wildly.

Now, with advances in genome sequencing technologies, all of the aberrant genes in any cancer can be inventoried, allowing existing treatment approaches to be tailored to individual cancer cases. This opens the door to the discovery and development of scores of new cancer treatments aimed directly at the products of defective genes.

For example, during the Clinical Trials Plenary Sessions at the AACR Annual Meeting 2021, researchers presented data from a phase 3 trial in patients with relapsed, slow-spreading non-Hodgkin lymphoma.

The researchers showed that combining the standard-of-care drug rituximab with copanlisib — a therapeutic that targets the PI3K cell-signaling pathway, which lymphoma cells rely on for survival — could reduce the risk of disease progression or death by half, compared with a placebo and rituximab.

In another trial, selpercatinib, a first-in-class, highly selective, and potent RET kinase inhibitor that is approved to treat some lung and thyroid cancers, showed promise for several other cancer types, including pancreatic cancer, colon cancer, and breast cancer.

Genome sequencing approaches are also increasingly used to detect cancer DNA shed into blood and body fluids, giving rise to what will be a new generation of cancer screening and monitoring tests.

Several presentations from the meeting showcased multicancer early detection tests that utilize machine learning and cell-free DNA from liquid biopsy samples to search for abnormal patterns of DNA methylation.

Source: Medical News Today