Cancer therapy based on anatomical location may soon b...( n more than 50 percent of patients with...),Health

n more than 50 percent of patients with advanced cancer. But instead of considering a drug that works only ten percent of the time a failure, he feels it would be better to consider such a drug effective for one in ten tumors and to search for the agents among the current arsenal of chemotherapeutic drugs that will work for the rest.

"We have more than 70 FDA-approved drugs that potentially could be useful for a particular tumor," McLeod says. "We are now working on methods that can be used to identify those drugs that will work for each patient's tumor."

Having a good tumor-drug match not only would improve survival rates, it would be cost-effective, according to McLeod.

"Since modern cancer therapies can be expensive -- sometimes approaching the cost of a bone marrow transplant -- the high cost reinforces the necessity of choosing the right therapy the first time," he says.

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Contact: Gwen Ericson
ericsong@wustl.edu
314-286-0141
Washington University School of Medicine
19-Apr-2006

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