NIH's ALCHEMIST Trial Launched

The NIH recently announced the launch of three integrated precision medicine trials to pinpoint early-stage lung cancer patients with tumors that harbor rare genetic changes and determine whether targeted treatments could improve survival.

The Adjuvant Lung Cancer Enrichment Marker Identification and Sequencing Trials, or ALCHEMIST, is supported by the National Cancer Institute, with the component trials coordinated by the Alliance for Clinical Trials in Oncology and the ECOG-ACRIN Cancer Research Group.

“We believe that the findings from ALCHEMIST will not only help answer an important question about the addition of targeted therapies in earlier stage disease but will also help us in understanding the prevalence and natural history of these genomic changes in earlier stage lung cancer. We also hope to gain a better understanding as well regarding the genetic changes in the tumor at the time of recurrence,” Shakun Malik, MD, head of Thoracic Cancer Therapeutics in the Clinical Investigations Branch of NCI, said in a press release. “The findings will help to define clinical, biologic and molecular behaviors of this type of lung cancer.”

Read the complete report: http://bit.ly/1mIDa97

Source: Healio