If chemotherapy is part of your integrated lung cancer treatment plan, your lung cancer team will do everything possible to target the therapy to your individual needs. Tumor molecular profiling can help determine the probability of the tumor’s response to specific chemotherapy drugs.

• By testing the lung cancer chemotherapy drugs outside of the body, your care team can determine whether the drugs will work if administered in the body, thereby avoiding unnecessary toxicity to you.
• This service also helps your care team determine the best combinations of chemotherapy to use for your particular type of lung cancer.

What is tumor molecular profiling?

The goal is to develop a cancer treatment plan personalized to your needs. Prior to delivering chemotherapy, we may perform tumor molecular profiling to identify chemotherapy drugs and other targeted therapies that are more likely to work for you.

By choosing more effective drugs, we can avoid unnecessary toxicity to you and target cancer cells as aggressively as possible from the start.

Oncologists use tumor molecular profiling to:

• Identify the unique molecular “blueprint” of each patient’s tumor.
• Choose cancer treatments that are more likely to be effective and rule out those that are unlikely to be effective, on an individual patient basis – minimizing trial and error.
• Discover potentially beneficial treatment options that may not have been considered in an initial treatment plan.

How it works

Every cancer cell has its own pattern of active genes and proteins. Molecular profiling tests for a variety of biomarkers in the DNA of a tissue sample to help us better diagnose, stage and treat cancer on an individualized basis.

A Molecular Profiling test is a comprehensive tumor analysis test that matches therapies to your specific biomarker information to develop an evidence-based treatment plan.

If you have a solid tumor, we’ll try to get a sample of tissue during a biopsy or surgery. Then, we’ll test for the presence of a variety of enzymes, proteins and genes to identify which therapies are likely to be most effective.

By comparing the tumor’s information with data from thousands of clinical cancer research studies, the test identifies which treatments are likely to be most effective and which treatments are likely to be ineffective. This provides us with more and better information to develop a personalized treatment plan for you.

Candidates for tumor molecular profiling include:

• Patients with solid tumors.
• Patients with highly aggressive cancers that may not respond or have not responded to standard of care therapies.
• Patients with rare tumor types.