Integrated Molecular Analysis of Cancer (IMAC)

Advances in our understanding of cancer biology has led to a rapid expansion of molecularly targeted therapeutics in pre-clinical and clinical development over the last decade. The systematic sequencing of cancer genomes has revealed that individual tumours frequently harbor multiple "driver" somatic mutations that confer growth advantage and positive selection. Importantly, many of the altered proteins resulting from the mutations identified by these studies are in fact actionable, i.e. "druggable", targets. Hence, evaluating drug efficacy in tumours selected by a combination of histopathology and molecular analysis has the potential to result in a greater therapeutic gain. The premises behind personalised cancer medicine include: i) genetic aberrations exist in human malignancies; ii) a subset of these aberrations frequently exist across multiple tumour types and have functional relevance as drivers for oncogenesis and tumour progression; iii) the molecular effects of these genetic aberrations are potentially actionable targets; and iv) there are medicinal compounds that can safely and effectively modulate such targets in patients with these tumours. The key challenge to optimising this personalised approach to cancer therapy is to ensure that patients with tumours harbouring specific molecular/ genetic aberrations are specifically matched to a particular drug or combination of drugs. In this respect, molecular analysis of tumours to identify somatic mutations and/or other genetic aberrations are examples of enrichment strategies to assist in matching patients to drugs or treatments that have gained increasing interest in the oncology community. The ability to characterise the unique genetic features of each patient's tumour will be a critical step to identifying the optimal therapeutic strategy for the individual.