Innovative molecular diagnostics deployed in the clinic enable new ways to stratify patients into appropriate treatment regimens. These approaches may resolve a major challenge for early-phase clinical trials, which is to recruit patients who, while having failed previous treatments, may nevertheless respond to molecularly targeted drugs. We report the findings of a prospective, single-center study conducted in patients with diverse refractory cancers who underwent comprehensive genomic profiling (CGP; next-generation sequencing, 236 genes). Of the 500 patients enrolled, 188 (37.6%) received either matched (N = 122/188, 65%) or unmatched therapy (N = 66/188, 35%). The most common reasons that patients were not evaluable for treatment included insufficient tissue, death, or hospice transfer. The median number of molecular alterations per patient was five (range, 1-14); median number of prior therapies, four. The most common diagnoses were ovarian cancer (18%), breast cancer (16%), sarcoma (13%), and renal cancer (7%). Of the 339 successfully profiled patients, 317 (93.5%) had at least one potentially actionable alteration. By calculating matching scores, based on the number of drug matches and genomic aberrations per patient, we found that high scores were independently associated with a greater frequency of stable disease ≥6 months/partial/complete remission [22% (high scores) vs. 9% (low scores), P = 0.024], longer time-to-treatment failure [hazard ratio (HR) = 0.52; 95% confidence interval (CI) = 0.36-0.74; P = 0.0003], and survival (HR = 0.65; 95% CI = 0.43-1.0; P = 0.05). Collectively, this study offers a clinical proof of concept for the utility of CGP in assigning therapy to patients with refractory malignancies, especially in those patients with multiple genomic aberrations for whom combination therapies could be implemented. Cancer Res; 76(13); 3690-701. ©2016 AACR.
Trial registration: ClinicalTrials.gov NCT02437617.
©2016 American Association for Cancer Research.