Personalized Medicine through Tumor Sequencing

One of the main recent advances in cancer therapy is the identification of medications that target specific gene mutations. In 2001 Gleevec was approved to treat patients with the BCR-ABL fusion in chronic myelogenous leukemia (CML), but since then many more drugs have been developed. Currently, there are numerous ongoing trials to identify tumor drivers that can be attacked by a drug. In order to identify the mutations driving a tumor, the tumor needs to be sequenced. There are a range of different approaches for sequencing tumors ranging from the sequencing of a few genes in the tumor up to paired whole-exome sequencing in both the tumor and adjacent normal tissue. Each type of sequencing has benefits and drawbacks and a balance needs to be made between cost and usability of the results. We have developed a clinical workflow for a 50 gene panel that identifies mutations in hotspots in known cancer genes. This workflow uses BaseSpace, VarSeq and N-Of-One to provide insight for our physicians and patients.