Study Reinforces Focus on Personalized Treatment for Lung Cancer Patients Based on Ethnicity

More news stories on Racial Differences

Medical News Today, October 8, 2009

Clinical research out of University Hospitals Case Medical Center has found that African Americans with a common form of lung cancer have a lower frequency of drug-sensitizing genetic mutations, which may impact response to new cancer-fighting drugs. Published online in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, the study by Rom Leidner, MD, and colleagues report that ethnicity plays a significant role in non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) genetics and more personalized treatments may be beneficial to cancer patients.

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These findings add to a growing body of evidence demonstrating genetic variation in genetic pathways between ethnic groups, and underscores the need for incorporation of these differences into the design of future clinical trials with agents targeting the EGFR pathway.

Epidemiologic studies have suggested that African Americans have a higher risk of NSCLC and have poorer outcomes with treatment. Ethnic background and genetic make-up are linked, and consequently, may impact the likelihood of major responses to oral EGFR inhibiting drugs. For example, in large international lung cancer trials a higher percentage of East Asian NSCLC patients were found to carry drug-sensitizing mutations of the EGFR gene than Caucasians, and as predicted the highest rates of response to EGFR inhibitor drugs were found in the East Asian patients.

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“In the future, this may lead clinical cancer researchers to be able to take advantage of these findings for a ‘smart-design approach’ to clinical trials in lung cancer, with novel treatments and biomarkers employed among different patient populations or even individuals,” says Stanton Gerson, MD, Director of the University Hospitals Ireland Cancer Center as well as the Case Comprehensive Cancer Center. “Targeted treatments for patients based on a myriad of genetic and ethnic factors are the wave of the future and may lead the way to improved cure rates for our cancer patients.”

[Editor’s Note: “Genetic Abnormalities of the EGFR Pathway in African American Patients With Non-Small-Cell Lung Cancer,” by Rom S. Leidner, et al. can be downloaded as a PDF file here. There is a charge.]

Original article

(Posted on October 9, 2009)

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Comments

1 — Spartan24 wrote at 6:17 PM on October 9:

It is a proven fact that certain medications effect the races differently. My grandmother was a nurse and told me about a certain medication used during childbirth often made black women very agitated but almost never caused agitation in anyone else.

2 — Zorba_the_Geek wrote at 6:18 PM on October 9:

“Ethnicity”?? Don’t they realize “ethnicity” -same as “race”- is simply a social construct, with no independent scientific validity?

Seriously, if medical practitioners had to take in earnest all the pronouncements of so-called “anti-racists,” they might as well throw away their stethoscopes and CAT-scan machines, and learn to dance in a loincloth waving a horsehair fly whisk in front of their sick patients, for all the good they would do.

3 — Shawn (the female) wrote at 7:49 PM on October 9:

Well, of COURSE we’re different; otherwise we’d all be the same color, with generally the same features, generally the same height range, with much less difference in hair texture.

Well, just look around. Were NOT the same. That means that our genetic make up is different, so our medical needs in some areas must be treated different.

I got my medical degree at Wal-Mart, but even I know this.

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