Colon, pancreatic, stomach, or ovarian cancer; it increasingly shouldn’t matter. In an era of precision medicine, the treatment approach should reflect the genetic makeup of the person’s tumor and the presence or absence of key biomarkers.
That ethos was set in stone on Tuesday, with the landmark FDA approval of Merck’s checkpoint inhibitor, Keytruda (pembrolizumab), for patients with solid tumors that express so-called mismatched repair genes.
In a statement, FDA noted the historic nature of its decision. “This is the first time the agency has approved a cancer treatment based on a common biomarker rather than the location in the body where the tumor originated.”
It has been a long time in the making. Scientists’ understanding of cancer has shifted dramatically in the 21st Century, helped along by initiatives such as the human genome project and the advent of next-generation sequencing.
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