A new UC San Francisco-led study challenges the dogma in oncology that most cancers are caused by one dominant “driver” mutation that can be treated in isolation with a single targeted drug. Instead, the new research finds one of the world’s most deadly forms of lung cancer is driven by changes in multiple different genes, which appear to work together to drive cancer progression and to allow tumors to evade targeted therapy.
These findings — published online on November 6, 2017 in Nature Genetics — strongly suggest that new first-line combination therapies are needed that can treat the full array of mutations contributing to a patient’s cancer and prevent drug resistance from arising.
“Currently we treat patients as if different oncogene mutations are mutually exclusive. If you have an EGFR mutation we treat you with one class of drugs, and if you have a KRAS mutation we pick a different class of drugs. Now we see such mutations regularly coexist, and so we need to adapt our approach to treatment,” said Trever Bivona, MD, PhD, a UCSF Medical Center oncologist, associate professor in hematology and oncology, and member of the Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center at UCSF.
