Most experimental cancer drugs never make it to market because they don’t help enough people in early clinical trials. But even in “failed” drug trials, researchers may find that a few patients see their tumors shrink dramatically. Since it’s not clear why some respond but most don’t, researchers typically shake their heads and move on. But researchers today report that by sequencing the entire genome of one outlier patient’s tumor, they learned why her cancer disappeared when she took an experimental drug that didn’t help others. That drug now has a new lease on life for this cancer, and such testing may help revive other cancer drugs that showed promise in lab studies but initially failed in clinical testing.
