Oncology enters its agnostic period

It used to be that if you had a cancer drug, getting FDA approval meant finding a lot of patients with, say, ovarian cancer and proving in a clinical trial your treatment could help. If you thought it might work in lung cancer, too, you had to recruit another study and prove it all over again.

But yesterday’s approval of a drug from Roche illustrates what is becoming the new normal in oncology. The treatment, Rozlytrek, is approved for patients with any cancer type so long as they test positive for a certain genetic mutation.

It’s the third time the FDA has granted such an approval, and it’s unlikely to be the last. The promise of such precision medicine has lured a host of companies into developing tumor-agnostic cancer therapies, many of which are now in clinical trials.

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