Asian women with late-stage lung cancer in Metro Vancouver are now routinely tested for a genetic mutation that can improve their treatment.

Its a made-in-B.C. adaptation of international genetic research that has found a high proportion of Asian women with lung cancer have never smoked. They carry a particular genetic makeup that drives tumour growth yet also responds to a line of drugs called tyrosine kinase inhibitors, or TKIs.

The treatment wont eradicate cancer, but can prolong lives, said Dr. Barbara Melosky, a researcher at the BC Cancer Agency and professor of medicine at the University of British Columbia.

People have been talking about targeted therapy for 10 years, but we actually found one that works very well with lung cancer.

Although we cannot cure these patients, many of them live years, rather than months.

About 10 to 20 per cent of all lung cancer patients carry a mutated epidermal growth factor receptor gene that speeds tumour growth. That number rises to about 40 per cent among all East Asians with non-small-cell lung cancer, the most common type. Among non-smoking East Asian women from China, Japan, Taiwan and Korea, it rises to between 60 and 80 per cent.

There were 268 new lung cancer diagnoses in the Vancouver Coastal Health region in 2009 the year for which most recent statistics are available. Asian women who never smoked could account for up to 20 per cent of those cases, Melosky estimates.

Smoking is the primary cause of lung cancer.

Previously, TKI medication was given to all cancer patients in the hopes of slowing its spread, but targeting patients through genetic testing is proving to be more effective, says Melosky.

The BC Cancer Agency was an early research location for this testing and the province one of the first to introduce screening in 2011, she added.

Read the original post:
Genetic screening in Metro Vancouver helps target lung cancer treatment

Comments are closed.