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Lung cancer's drug response could vary based on race, study says

Non-small cell lung cancer could be expressed different ways in people of African and of European descent, impacting the effectiveness of certain medicines, according to a study by the American Association for Cancer Research.

Researchers analyzed the NSCLC tissue of 138 patients and found that 637 genes in African-Americans' tumor tissue expressed differently than in normal tissue, while 1,844 genes from European-American patients expressed differently.

While the mutated genes in African-American tissue typically play a role in stem cell biology and invasive behavior, the mutated genes in European-Americans were those involved in cell cycles and growth.

Researchers predicted that based on these differences, African-Americans with NSCLC could be resistant to 53 drugs that would provoke a response in European-Americans with the cancer.

"Much of the revolutionary work that underpins precision medicine has been conducted on populations of European descent, with limited work in minority populations," Bríd Ryan, an NIH Stadtman Investigator in the Laboratory of Human Carcinogenesis at the National Cancer Institute, said in a statement.

The study echoes analysis from a recent analysis of the multiple myeloma patients that found African-American patients with the blood cancer showed significantly less of a protein often present in the European-American patient population. Similarly, most of the trial patients were white, despite the disease being far more prevalent in the African-American population.

Ryan said this is the first genomic analysis of this kind for lung cancer, and as such it would need to be replicated in a larger patient population.

"We are entering the age of 'precision medicine' in which diagnosis and therapy decisions for each cancer patient will be based on detailed molecular and chemical fingerprints," Ryan said.

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There are several cancer drugs in development that focus on specific proteins to raise the body's immune response to cancer. At least five therapies from major drug makers are in phase 3 trials for NSCLC in particular, including Merck & Co. Inc.'s Keytruda, Bristol-Myers Squibb Co.'s Opdivo, Roche Holding AG's Tecentriq, AstraZeneca PLC's Imfinzi, and Bavencio from Pfizer Inc. and Merck KGaA.