Cancer is an evolutionary disease. The same forces that turned dinosaurs into birds turn normal cells into cancer: genetic mutations and traits that confer a survival advantage.

Cancer arises by these same evolutionary pressures, but at the level of individual cells within a person’s body. Instead of animals fighting for survival in a harsh environment, cells compete for space and nutrients. Because different organs are composed of different kinds of cells, cancers arising from different organs differ from one another in appearance and behavior and in how well they respond to treatment.

Treatments can drive cancer evolution

Treatment can also push cancer to evolve further, gaining advantageous mutations that help them survive and resist therapy.

Over time, the tumors evolve in response to anticancer drugs and develop mutations that change the drug targets qualitatively and quantitatively, so they can sustain to survive. In these instances, patients require different therapies to overcome resistance.

Not an easy fight

The fight against cancer is a fight against evolution, the fundamental process that has driven life on Earth since time immemorial. This is not an easy fight, but medicine has made tremendous progress.

Key questions

"Our breakthrough approach led us to question whether the majority of cancer patients excluded from precision medicine by the standard-of-care biomarker testing have the second chance to access to other personalized and targeted treatment options," said OncoDxrX.

"And indeed, our PGA (Patient-derived Gene expression-informed Anticancer drug efficacy) technology showed that its results could help clinical decision-making and improve patient outcome. This provides a gap-filling and complementary means to the classical biomarker testing paradigm to benefit more patients."

Critical insights

The OncoDxRx team uncovered a link between cancer patient’s gene expression pattern and anticancer drug response.

Once the patient’s own genetic fingerprints are established in laboratory, the personal codes are then used to analyze, screen, match and catalog potentially effective drugs in silico (from a pool of 700+ approved, investigational or clinical trial drug candidates) within a week.

Study implications

This revolutionary technology not only challenges the existing molecular diagnostics perspectives but also opens new avenues for improving the efficacy of targeted and immune therapies in cancer treatment.

"Our validation demonstrated that the patient-unique gene expression signature is strongly correlated with tumor’s response to anticancer drugs," said OncoDxRx.

"We hope that our discoveries shed new light on the gene-drug relationship and delivery of personalized therapies to patients with limited treatment options."

Tremendous potential

"There is tremendous potential in utilizing PGA to inform potential drug responses in human tumors and clinical studies are ongoing in other cancer types besides lung, breast and pancreatic cancers," said OncoDxRx.

"We have learned that, not surprisingly, gene expression is more efficient at getting to drug responses than gene sequence. PGA’s positive impact on patient outcome are likely to transform the next generation of cancer therapies."