Fox Chase taking more personalized tack

Friday, May 29, 2009

Philadelphia Business Journal - by John George

Fox Chase Cancer Center’s new Institute for Personalized Medicine is planning to do its part to put an end to the one-size-fits-all method of treating cancer.

The institute was established last week to embark on a large-scale project of matching emerging targeted drug therapies to the unique genetic profiles of individual patient tumors.

"It’s fair to say we are at a point in the evolution of cancer research and cancer treatment that we’ve reached an inflection point," said Dr. Jeff Boyd, the Philadelphia cancer center’s chief scientific officer. "We are poised to begin making progress at a much more rapid rate than the public is used to seeing."

The Fox Chase Institute for Personalized Medicine will be working with pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies, academic medical centers and its own researchers to produce cancer treatments aimed at patients based on the cancer-related genes present in their tumors.

"Drug companies are very good at coming up with new cancer therapeutic agents," Boyd said. "What they need help with is seeing if those agents are effective in real people and determining what people should be targeted. The one-size-fits-all paradigm is history. We now know no two cancers are alike, even cancers of the same tissue type. … We shouldn’t be treating all breast cancers or colon cancers or ovary cancers the same way."

Fox Chase already has a biosample repository and tumor bank with tens of thousands of specimens. It will search those samples using the latest gene-sequencing technology to identify those genes and genetic mutations in tumors and tumor pathways that experimental therapeutic molecules are designed to target.

The next step will be to contact patients who provided the samples containing the specific cancer-related gene, Boyd said, and bring in those with recurring cancer to participate in early-stage testing of the experimental treatments.

Fox Chase researchers believe whole-genome sequencing will become standard practice for cancer treatment in a few years.

"Instead of simply enrolling patients into phase-I trials who have been treated with and failed to respond to every standard treatment, the information we gain in this project may allow us to determine more accurately which patients should be enrolled into which clinical trial," said Dr. Roger B. Cohen, director of Fox Chase’s Phase I Clinical Trials Program.

Phase-I trials use a small number of patients to provide safety information and identify side effects. "Of course, this does not just apply to phase-I trials. It potentially applies to all lines of cancer therapy, including selection of the patient’s first chemotherapy treatment," Cohen said.

Boyd said Fox Chase has already contacted about two dozen large and small pharmaceutical and biotech companies that have expressed an interest in participating in the program.

Personalized medicine is being studied at research institutions nationwide.

The Coriell Institute for Medical Research in Camden, for example, last year launched its personalized medicine collaborative that has the ultimate goal of providing personalized disease risk assessments and information to participants in a study.

Fox Chase’s program will have a core staff of about 10 people and receive contributions from about 50 senior leaders and researchers from throughout the Fox Chase campus.

"With information from this program, we should eventually be able to choose a drug or set of drugs that will be optimally effective for a patient based on molecular analysis of an individual patient’s tumor," said Dr. George Simon, Fox Chase’s director of thoracic oncology.

"We will be able to offer doctors more effective, personally tailored treatment options for their patients," he said.