This spring, the National Cancer Institute will fund a program called Match to test the effects of a dozen or more new drugs on thousands of patients’ tumors. These so-called basket studies would group tumors from different types of cancers together, and a specific drug would be administered to patients possessing the same mutation. This means that patients would be treated by mutation rather than cancer type. The studies will not have control groups of patients and will be smaller than usual studies. Nonetheless, the FDA has indicated that data from basket studies could be sufficient to approve the drugs. These basket studies have become possible with the improvement of sequencing quality and its declining costs, allowing tumors to be screened for tens of mutations. In addition, the development of drugs to treat individual mutations has increased. Dr. Keith Flaherty, principal investigator of Match, expects the study to begin with 12–15 drugs or baskets and expand to 40 or more.

Source: The New York Times