The Worldwide Innovative Network in personalised cancer medicine consortium - WIN Consortium announces the publication of the Digital Display Precision Predictor: the prototype of a global biomarker model to guide treatments with targeted therapy and predict progression-free survival for cancer patients in NPJ Precision Oncology 

Precision oncology has led to approved, molecularly specific, biomarker-defined indications for targeted therapies. With the number of validated drug targets increasing, testing each patient's tumour for all markers related to all possible targeted therapies becomes infeasible due to the limited amount of tissue usually obtained by biopsies.

In addition, the current companion diagnostic approach used for most targeted therapies provides limited treatment options, with a binary "yes/no" expected response to a drug and no recommendation for which treatment, among a range of possible options, is likely to be the best option for a particular patient.

The Digital Display Precision Predictor (DDPP), is a biomarker strategy and tool able to predict the duration of progression-free survival (PFS) for multiple targeted treatments for patients with advanced/metastatic cancers, based on the comprehensive investigation of the whole transcriptome (the gene expression profile of the tumour compared to that of normal tissue).

DDPP is based on:

1) the exploration of the whole transcriptome (20,000 genes) providing insight into the status of activation of almost all drug targets in the context of the network of genes or pathways that drive tumour progression;

2) the data can be obtained from a single assessment requiring very small amounts of tumour and analogous normal tissues, and

3) the prediction of the duration of the time until tumour progression (PFS) under a specific therapeutic regimen.

"One of the main challenges of finding new biomarkers is that they are built in a relatively small number of patients treated with the same drug (from the WINTHER trial), for whom both molecular profiles (from tumour and analogous normal tissues) and PFS data were available," said Dr Josep Tabernero, Vice-Chairman and Chairman of Scientific Advisory Board of WIN, Director, Vall d'Hebron Institute of Oncology, VHIO (Spain) and past ESMO President (2018-2019).

"The DDPP is potentially a new global biomarker tool that can apply to any type of cancer drug used alone or in combination, agnostic of tumour type, and can lead, pending further prospective validation, to a new approach to optimise treatment selection for patients with cancer," concluded Dr Richard L. Schilsky, Chairman of WIN.

Source: Win Consortium