Cancer In The Crosshairs

By targeting each patient’s unique tumor, PRECISION MEDICINE is crushing once untreatable cancers. But only a fraction of patients currently benefit. Can medicine close the gap?

- David H. Freedman

FOR TENS OF THOUSANDS OF PATIENTS, precision medicine is rewriting their cancer stories. Linda Boyed, for example, an energetic 52-year-old occupational therapist, was thrilled to be on vacation with her family in Hawaii, hitting the beaches and taking long walks. But she couldn’t shake a constant feeling of fatigue. By the time she returned home, near Columbus, Ohio, her skin had yellowed. Her doctor passed her to an oncologist, who delivered the bad news: Cancer of the bile ducts in her liver had already spread too far for chemotherapy or surgery to do any good. He offered to help keep her comfortable for her final few months.

Boyed’s husband refused to accept that prognosis. He found a doctor at Ohio State’s cancer center who was running studies of experimental drugs for gastrointestinal cancers. Boyed signed herself up. Genetic tests on her tumors revealed a mutation in a gene called FGFR (short for “fibroblast growth factor receptor”), which was likely spurring cancer’s growth. The doctor gave her an experimental drug, called BGJ398, to inhibit the action of the FGFR mutation. Boyed’s symptoms cleared up, the tumors stopped growing, and she regained the weight she had lost.

That was three years ago. These days Boyed gets downright bubbly when she tells the story. “I basically lead a normal life now,” she says. “I just watched my son graduate from high school. I think I actually did more in the past year than I did before cancer.”