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Missing the target in cancer therapy

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The deployment of molecular biomarkers that are indicative of sensitivity to tumor-targeted or immune-targeted cancer therapies improves the outcome of individual patients and increases the chances of successful drug approval. However, for many lethal malignancies, the majority of clinical trials are conducted with patients who do not have biomarkers and hence they miss the target.

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Fig. 1: Example of responders versus non-responders among hypothetical patients with cancer of unknown primary and lung metastases.

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Acknowledgements

Funded in part by the Joan and Irwin Jacobs Fund, and by the National Cancer Institute grant P30 CA023100 (R.K.).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Internal Medicine, University of South Florida, H. Lee Moffitt Cancer Center & Research Institute, Tampa, FL, USA

    Jacob J. Adashek

  2. Morsani College of Medicine, University of South Florida, Tampa, FL, USA

    Alexey Goloubev

  3. Center for Personalized Cancer Therapy and Division of Hematology and Oncology, Department of Medicine, University of California San Diego Moores Cancer Center, La Jolla, CA, USA

    Shumei Kato & Razelle Kurzrock

Authors
  1. Jacob J. Adashek
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  2. Alexey Goloubev
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  3. Shumei Kato
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  4. Razelle Kurzrock
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Razelle Kurzrock.

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Competing interests

S.K. consults for Foundation Medicine, has received a speaker’s fee from Roche, and has research grants from ACT Genomics, Sysmex, Konica Minolta and OmniSeq. R.K. has research funding from Incyte, Genentech, Merck Serono, Pfizer, Sequenom, Foundation Medicine, Guardant Health, Grifols, Boehringer Ingelheim and Konica Minolta; has consultant and/or speaker fees from LOXO, X-Biotech, Actuate Therapeutics, Genentech, Pfizer, Roche and NeoMed; has an equity interest in IDbyDNA and Curematch; and is a board member of CureMatch and CureMetrix and co-founder of CureMatch.

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Adashek, J.J., Goloubev, A., Kato, S. et al. Missing the target in cancer therapy. Nat Cancer 2, 369–371 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s43018-021-00204-w

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