Deutsche medizinische Wochenschrift
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Dtsch. Med. Wochenschr. · Sep 2023
[Molecular tumor diagnostics as the driving force behind precision oncology].
Molecular pathological diagnostics plays a central role in personalized oncology and requires multidisciplinary teamwork. It is just as relevant for the individual patient who is being treated with an approved therapy method or an individual treatment attempt as it is for prospective clinical studies that require the identification of specific therapeutic target structures or complex biomarkers for study inclusion. ⋯ Future developments will be significantly shaped by improvements in scalable molecular diagnostics, in which increasingly complex and multi-layered data sets must be quickly converted into clinically useful information. One focus will be on the development of adaptive diagnostic strategies in order to be able to depict the enormous plasticity of a cancer disease over time.
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Dtsch. Med. Wochenschr. · Sep 2023
[Histology-agnostic tumor treatment - a farewell to tumor entities?].
Considerable efforts concerning the molecular characterization and targeted treatment of cancer have significantly improved treatment options and prognosis of tumor patients. Nevertheless, in tumor entities without recurrent genetic alterations the application of molecular testing for potentially targetable lesions remains heterogeneous and, in most cases, the approval of targeted therapies is still restricted to defined tumor entities harboring corresponding predictive biomarkers. ⋯ In the meantime, a handful targeted therapeutics addressing NRTK and RET fusions, the BRAF V600E mutation or different features of defective DNA mismatch repair and high tumor mutational burden has been approved for histology-agnostic treatment of tumors harboring these target lesions. Ongoing molecularly stratified basket trials will further investigate the tumor-agnostic efficacy of different targeted treatment approaches.