Precision medicine: A tailored therapy for each tumor
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Each tumor uses specific, individual biochemical pathways to grow and to escape natural defense mechanisms such as apoptosis or immune responses. These pathways are encoded in the tumors aberrant DNA. The abnormal genetic code in the tumor results in aberrant expression of genes and proteins.
Next Generation Sequencing today enables us to determine the activity as well as mutations of all the genes in each individual tumor with great precision. By analyzing the mutations and other aberrations such as copy number variations or fusion genes the resulting abnormal pathways the tumor employs to survive can often be identified. Often, specific existing drugs that intervene with these pathways can be applied. This tumor-tailored treatment is referred to as Precision Medicine.
For the best possible treatment, the specific metabolism of a particular tumor is decisive for its treatment. This requires to match the molecular information about the tumor metabolism with the state of the art know-how about drug effects but also the information about clinical and preclinical trials for the drug of interest.
Precision Medicine paves the way for individual, new and highly promising therapeutic options for each patient. Thus, this technology could become a game changer for every cancer patient. Thanks to our smart and powerful techniques for analyzing the tumor metabolism in combination with accurate bioinformatics pipelines we quickly became experts in this exiting and and revolutionary field of precision medicine. We are proud to have convinced leading experts in the field with our approaches to chose us as partners for colaboration.
Making precision medicine more precise
Precision Medicine is already applied in the most progressive hospitals in the USA and in Europe. However, because of its novelty and lack of expertise in most hospitals it is currently only available for a limited number of patients and also costs are still high. GenXPro strives to change this unfavorable situation by providing for each patient the chance to obtain the best suited treatment.
We analyse what the cancer is doing and not only how it is looking like
Cancer is not only driven by genetic changes (mutations, CNVs, fusions), but also by ofther factors, that influence the metabolism of the cells such as epigenetics. All cancer-driving events however manifest themselves in a changed gene expression. In contrast to most other approaches, we therefore combine high-resolution gene expression analysis with knowledge about genetic abnormalities.
Our approach determines also the “tumor mutation load” or “tumor mutation burden”, the number of mutations per megabase in the tumor DNA. This number is, together with gene expression data for checkpoint inhibitors and their receptors a key factor for the success of immunotherapies (see A.Ribas, NEJM, N Engl J Med 2015; 373:1490-1492).
Our MACE-Seq technology, in combination with sequencing of the tumors gene coding DNA, produces a highly accurate genetic and gene expression profile of the individual tumor or metastases at optimal cost/benefit ratio.
Many cancer gene panels target only few genes that are often not expressed in the tumor. Our profiles show exactly which mutations the tumor has and which biochemical pathways it uses.
We exploit the enormous information available in public databases such as “The Cancer Genome Atlas” (TCGA), an initiative of the National Cancer Institute of the USA. These data bases contain genetic and clinical information about hundreds and thousands of tumors and cancer cell lines. If tumors with a characteristic gene activity profile or cell cultures with a similar expression pattern have already been successfully treated with a certain drug, the same drug can also be applied to an individual patient’s tumor. Also, the data can help to design new therapies which engage the immune system against relevant immunologically accessible mutated proteins that the tumor generates.
In recent years we have developed and refined statistical and bioinformatics methods to identify the most important pathways and transcripts of an individual tumor with very high security. Our algorithms are constantly improved whenever additional data is available.
Altogether, our expertise that we have developed during 10 years of research, and that we are constantly improving, is working with publicly funded projects together with doctors and clinicians, enabling the doctor to choose a drug according to the patient’s individual needs.
Learn more about GenXPros Precision Medicine Approaches in the slides below:
Declaration of Non-Liability:
GenXPro is not accredited according to the German Gendiagnostik-Gesetz. Therefore, for the time being the company cannot and will not provide diagnostic services for legal reasons. All interaction between the company and customers with cancer solely aims at improving the knowledge on cancer genetics by research. Results eventually arising from this research may not be used as advice for making therapeutic decisions for legal reasons. Please contact us if you are a patient or a doctor, if you would like to learn more about our analyses