A revolutionary way of targeting tumours could beat even the worst cancers — SkimNews
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- Stephen Huff, a fit 29-year-old former professional baseball player diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer, had tumors across his lungs, spine, liver and brain — until comprehensive genomic profiling identified an ALK gene alteration and he was treated with alectinib, causing tumors to shrink or disappear within weeks.
- David Thomas at the University of New South Wales oversaw a 2016 Garvan Institute trial of nearly 4,000 advanced cancer patients; over a third received matched targeted drugs and lived almost twice as long as unmatched participants.
- Australia's nationwide comprehensive genomic profiling program, launched in 2023 under Thomas, has enrolled over 26,000 people with poor-prognosis cancers, with 48.5% receiving strong treatment recommendations.
- Pancreatic cancer, long called the "worst of the worst," now shows five-year survival above 30% for patients matched to treatment via genomic profiling versus just 4% for the unmatched; a newly US-approved drug called daraxonrasib doubled survival for those with KRAS-mutated disease.
- Brain cancer patients with IDH1/IDH2-mutated gliomas were 61% less likely to experience cancer worsening on the targeted drug vorasidenib compared with placebo in clinical trials.
- Japan, Germany, Norway and Denmark now offer comprehensive genomic profiling routinely through their public healthcare systems; the US has no national program and only about 1 in 4 advanced-cancer patients undergo the testing.
- NHS England sequences hundreds of genes per tumor but reports results for only 1 to 10 genes, prompting researchers to advocate adding 30 "research genes" to expand clinical trial recruitment.
Why it matters: For the millions diagnosed with cancers once considered untreatable, precision oncology has begun converting death sentences into years of life — but only where healthcare systems expand testing. With Australia enrolling 26,000+ in a national program, the gap between countries rolling out genomic profiling (Japan, Germany, Denmark) and those lagging (the US, parts of the UK) will increasingly determine who survives the worst cancers.
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