Hundreds of clinical trials in oncology already use biomarkers to identify patients who have a higher or lower risk of disease progression, as well as help predict how patients will respond to different treatments. However, there has been no systematic overview on the landscape of biomarker use in oncology trials.
In this week’s Science Translational Medicine Robert Sikorski and Bin Yao present the results of their laudable and laborious task to analyse the public database ClinicalTrials.gov for this kind of information.
Their findings can be summarized as follows:
(1) More biomarker work is done in less frequent tumors (such as leukemias) than in more frequent types such as prostate cancer, so it seems that not the big cancer indications will be the first to become segmented into smaller populations with etter treatment options.
