

A Faster Way to Try Many Drugs on Many Cancers - pmcpinto
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/26/health/fast-track-attacks-on-cancer-accelerate-hopes.html

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bradddd
The biggest breakthrough here is the FDA's acceptance of basket studies--
claiming that they would approve drugs on it alone. That's a big win for
patients, who based on current practices, would have found themselves in the
control group.

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carbocation
This article describes "basket studies" in which patients with different
rumors that share underlying mutations will receive the same targeted
therapies. The name is inelegant but the logic of targeting shared mutations
in a basket of genetic disease is rational. The hard part will be teasing out
signal due to drug effect from signal due purely to enrollment in a trial,
which as stated in the article will require large-magnitude effects, and
probably heavy comparison to outside data.

One could also imagine a study protocol in which a single patient receives
many drugs targeted at various mutations, and the results could make sense
only at a large scale after decomposing the signal from many recipients of the
cocktail. This, however, is not what is described in the article.

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javiramos
This startup ([http://www.flatiron.com/](http://www.flatiron.com/)) is
attempting to create a database of cancer etc. At first I thought that the
idea was a bit too ahead of its time but now its value is becoming clearer.
Data will be a very powerful part of defeating cancer.

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christopheraden
It seems like they are doing more than that, though. Cancer data has been
collected (by law) and stored for decades. I'd be curious to see if FlatIron
was using historical records from Cancer Registries (California's Cancer
Registry has millions of cases, for example), or just "EMR and billing
systems".

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IndianAstronaut
>Cancer data has been collected (by law) and stored for decades

Have tissue samples been stored as well over the decades? I am not sure about
DNA preservation over the years, but it might at least give us some ideas of
cancer, especially inheritance issues surrounding cancer.

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christopheraden
You are correct about the tissue samples. CCR mostly collects treatment,
demographic, and disease information. I didn't get the feeling from their
website that FlatIron was collecting tissue samples, either, though.

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forloop
Paywall.

