Biomarkers key to better cancer trials

Joseph Nevins, director of the of the Duke Institute for Genome Sciences and Policy's Center for Applied Genomics & Technology, believes it's time to radically change the way that cancer drugs are developed if we expect to see a new generation of personalized therapies. Because of the complexity of cancer--breast cancer, he speculates, could be broken down into 15 different types of cancers - tissue samples should be collected from patients going through clinical trials so that more effective biomarkers can be developed to match a new treatment with a patient. Report