Time to do NGS on all cancers, and study every cancer molecularly/genetically – Sucharu Prakash
It is time! Time to do NGS on all cancers, and study every cancer molecularly/genetically. Today, with NGS technology available, there’s no reason why any patient with cancer should miss out on a targeted therapy or clinical trial. National guidelines lag way behind in this rapidly advancing precision oncology field. Testing rates nationally are abysmal. But we can change this! I have led efforts at Texas oncology to ensure that every advanced solid tumor be tested with NGS, and this initiative has been a great success. This proves that such testing can be done on a large scale in the community. Moreover, legislators have listened – TX biomarker bill, just passed, will mandate coverage of such testing. If we don’t check, we don’t know…and the patients miss out! So, let’s make NGS testing of cancers a priority and a reality.