Physicians & Clinicians

The practice of medical oncology is changing at an accelerating pace. Among the key advances is the availability of an increasing number of pathway-targeted cancer therapies, whose use is guided to a large extent by the detection of specific genetic abnormalities within individual patients’ tumors. Cancer genes whose tumor-specific alterations guide the use of currently approved therapeutics include BCR-ABL, HER2, EGFR, ALK, KIT, and BRAF. In the near future it is likely that dozens of additional cancer genes will become directly relevant for therapeutic decision-making. As a result, molecular testing of tumors is likely to be informative for a growing number of patients. The busy clinician will therefore face not only the challenge of understanding the use of new therapies, but also of keeping up to date on the relevant cancer genes and mutations. At the same time, patients are likely to have an increasing awareness of this field and therefore to demand information about the most recent and promising clinical trials for targeted cancer therapy.
 
The MGH Cancer Center Targeted Cancer Care website aims to provide both clinicians and patients with an up-to-date resource with which to navigate this rapidly evolving area of cancer medicine. The site includes a user-friendly platform for searching and learning about clinically-relevant cancer genetic abnormalities in their site-specific disease context. This information, compiled by experts in the respective disease areas, summarizes the essential clinical and pre-clinical information required to interpret these mutations. Most importantly, the site automatically finds and displays key clinical trials relevant to selected diseases, cancer genes and specific mutations. Using this tool, clinicians can identify trials, view key eligibility criteria, and if desired pursue referral of individual patients. In this way we hope the site will serve as a one-stop resource for accessing background knowledge, clinical application, and state-of-the-art clinical research in this field.