Wednesday, November 8, 2017

Very Brief Blog: Nature Reviews: Flurry of Articles on Tumor Evolution and Resistance

Nature Reviews publishes a flurry of articles on tumor evolution and drug resistance.  Some appear in Nature Reviews Cancer, focusing on biology; others in Nature Reviews Clinical Oncology, focusing more on therapy.

An open access article by Maley et al reviews "evolutionary and ecological features" of cancers.  This is an open access article that includes proposals for new terminology and standards.  Here.

Dagogo-Jack and Shaw review the general topic of tumor resistance and heterogeneity, here.   Rotow & Bivona review development of resistance specifically in NSCLC, here

Along this line, see also a new paper by Blakely et al. in Nature Genetics on the complexity of EGFR and passenger mutation profiles in NSCLC; here and Genomeweb here.    

Her2 Patients Should Be Subdivided
Also in the field of precision and biomarkers, Gingras et al. argue we have to get into subdivisions and precision within the class of Her2-positive cancers, here, describing the status quo as "lost in translation" and creating a plateau in patient benefit that we shouldn't accept.  Nishino et al. update readers on the current state of checkpoint biomarkers (and confusion) in immuno-oncology, here.