Ricardo Alvarez, Medical Director of the Breast Cancer Center & Director of Cancer Research, Cancer Treatment Centers of America (CTCA), Atlanta, GA, US, talks to touchONCOLOGY about the mutational landscape of metastatic cancers discovered from prospective clinical sequencing at a community practice cancer programme and the findings from the data he presented at ESMO 2018 in Munich, Germany. Dr Alvarez also discusses which type of patients are ideal candidates for next generation sequencing, and he highlights some of the limitations of precision medicine. Finally, Dr Alvarez gives us his throughs on the future of precision medicine and how this translate to clinical practice.
Questions:
1. What proportion of cancer patients in your institution are receiving drugs matched to mutations in their tumours? (0:11)
2. Could you tell us a little about the data you are presenting from community practices? (0:48)
3. Which tumours are most amenable to this approach? (1:59)
4. What are the limitations of this approach? (2:43)
5. By how much do you expect the proportion of cancer patients receiving matched treatment to rise in the coming years? (3:42)
Speaker disclosures: Ricardo Alvarez has nothing to disclose in relation to this interview.
Filmed at the European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO) 2018 Congress, Munich, Germany, 19–23 October 2018
