Clinical and Genomic Insights from Metastatic Cancers

Metastatic or recurrent cancers are a common cause of death among cancer patients.  Genomic investigations of cancer over the past 10 years have led to tremendous advancement in the understanding of the underlying biology and in the development of targeted treatment options.  Much of the discovery has been focused on primary treatment-naive cancers, since biological specimens for genomic analysis are more abundant in these cases that are available from patients with metastatic cancers. The lack of specimens has provided a significant obstacle in the genomic study of metastatic cancers.  Therefore, a recent study by Dr. Dan Robinson and colleagues reported in the journal Nature has raised excitement.  The investigators performed integrative analysis of DNA and RNA data for 500 metastatic lesions obtained from cancer patients with over 30 different primary cancer diagnoses to derive several types of molecular characterizations.  Though further studies are needed, applying these approaches to individual patients in the clinical setting of metastasis may lead to more precisely tailored therapeutic treatments with higher effectiveness. The May 2018 issue of Clinical Chemistry includes an expert commentary on this noteworthy study.