David Fabrizio on the Use of Genomic Profiling to Predict Patient Response to Cancer Treatment

Genomic-based solutions can help identify which cancer patients will respond better to treatment based on biomarkers, said David Fabrizio of Foundation Medicine, Inc.

Transcript (slightly modified)

Do you think the immunotherapy field needs a different approach to predict patient response to treatment?

Yeah, absolutely. I think right now IHC [immunohistochemistry] is the current method, and I spoke to some of the limitations, I think there are significant limitations to IHC. I think we need genomic-based solutions, quantitative solutions that can be universally adopted. So something like tumor mutational burden [TMB], which can be measured through comprehensive genomic profiling, is a solution.

And we know this because we’ve looked at the utility over more than 500 patients right now, in disease areas that include non-small cell lung cancer, bladder cancer, and metastatic melanoma, and we’ve published these results showing that you can identify biomarker-positive patients that in some cases lived 3 times longer than the negative group without their disease getting any worse, and that’s in lung cancer. In the bladder and melanoma studies, the biomarker-positive groups for TMB weren’t reached, the median survival wasn’t reached, compared to the ones who were negative. So it does have resounding clinical utility, and I think we’re going to start to see that expand to other indications.