Researchers at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and MIT have developed a new way to determine whether individual patients will respond to a specific cancer drug or not. This kind of test could help doctors to choose alternative therapies for patients who don’t respond to the therapies normally used to treat their cancer.
The new study, which appears today in Cell Reports, focused on glioblastoma, an aggressive form of brain cancer, and is part of a collaboration between Dana-Farber and the Koch Institute to find new biomarkers and diagnostic tests for cancer. The new technique, which involves removing tumor cells from patients, treating the cells with a drug, and then measuring changes in the cells’ mass, could be applied to a wide variety of cancers and drug treatments.
