34 Clinical OMICs March/April 2017 www.clinicalomics.com
In the Lab
I
n the fight against cancer, scientists and clinicians have
looked toward novel approaches that provide a more com-
prehensive understanding of the molecular mechanisms
that drive the disease—all with the hope of uncovering new
therapies that afford many patients a better quality of care.
To that end, in August of 2015, the National Cancer Institute
(NCI) began enrolling
patients into a unique
initiative that looked to
analyze cancer patients'
tumors for actionable
mutations for which a
targeted therapy already
exists . The unique aspect
is that patients were
grouped based on their
mutations and not their
specific cancer—with the
hope that treating these
cancers on the basis of
their mutational profile
will be more effective.
The program set up by
NCI is called the Molecu-
lar Analysis for Therapy
Choice (NCI-MATCH)
and is looking to exam-
ine tumor samples from
approximately 6,000 patients .
The goals are ambitious, and complicated by the concerns
expressed by many researchers about the complexity, accu-
racy, and reproducibility of next-generation sequencing
(NGS) for application in clinical trials . However, investiga-
tors involved with NCI-MATCH set out to address whether
the methodologies were
valid that the clinical
centers were using to iso-
late, sequence, and ana-
lyze the array of tumor
samples being collected .
Now, a recent report in
The Journal of Molecular
D i a g n o s t i c s — e n t i t l e d
"Analytical Validation
of the Next-Generation
Sequencing Assay for a
Nationwide Signal-Find-
ing Clinical Trial"—
confirms that the assay
tailored for this trial
is highly sensitive for
detecting genetic muta-
tions from a variety of
tumor tissue and, for
the first time, has been
reproduced with accu-
A Proper MATCH
Report: New NGS Method Up to Snuff for
Tumor Analysis in NCI-MATCH Clinical Trial
