Future Clinical Trials: Genetically Driven Trials.

The design of modern oncology clinical trials seeks to match patients' cancer molecular biomarkers with medications that specifically target those biomarkers, a general paradigm shift in cancer care coined clinical cancer biology. This approach exploits the synthetic lethality between a specific genetic alteration in the cancer cell and a drug: rapid termination of exaggerated kinase activity exemplifies this phenomenon. Synthetic lethality-based investigations are driven by rapidly evolving technologies for cancer molecular profiling. As these technologies evolve, future clinical trials will test drugs' activity based on the molecular mechanisms rather than by the tumor's appearance under a microscope.