Precision medicine involves using genetic information specific to a patient’s tumor to choose the most efficacious therapy for that individual. Identifying mechanisms that make certain tumors responsive to a particular drug, but not others, known as biomarker discovery, is vital to precision medicine approaches.

Daniel L. Faden, MD, of Mass. Eye and Ear/Harvard Medical School, uses translational genomic approaches to study biomarkers and precision medicine in head and neck cancer. Recently, Dr. Faden and colleagues examined specimens from a clinical trial in which patients received the novel drug, CDX-3379, prior to surgery. This allowed them to compare alterations in the DNA and RNA of the tumor before and after exposure to the drug. By examining the tumor of a patient with advanced oral cavity cancer, who experienced a near complete response after only two doses of the drug, Dr. Faden became the first to demonstrate that amplification and overexpression of the gene FZD3 may lead to sensitivity to CDX-3379.

Utilizing a “bedside-to-bench” approach, he and colleagues then studied this mechanism of sensitivity in the laboratory using head and neck cancer cells. This work can be found in the most recent edition of the Journal of Clinical Oncology-Precision Oncology.