NAUTIL.US | TEXT SETS Even if each outlier case only applies to 3 or 7 per- kidney cancer, sent his cancer into remission. Wash- cent of one type of cancer, as more cases are solved, ington University now has a special genetic test for the benefits quickly add up. “We’re talking about patients with his type of leukemia. small subsets of patients that together make a radi- Just recently, Solit’s group solved another excep- cal change,” says Funda Meric-Bernstam, chair of the tional responder mystery—a case of ureteral cancer Department of Investigational Cancer Therapeutics at — eliminated with a combination of old and new drugs. MD Anderson, who leads the unusual responders pro- The old drug is a standard chemotherapy treatment gram. In some cases, existing cancer drugs can simply _ that prevents DNA from unwinding, which it must do be repurposed, such as discover- in order to duplicate itself dur- ing that an immunosuppressant ing cell division. The new one drug works for certain bladder sensitizes cells to the effects of cancers. Or rt might mean find- in) A -_ radiation. This patient tumed ing new life for an experimental out to have a mutation in RADS50, drug that had been abandoned. Is involved in repairing broken If Conley and Doroshow can ime DNA strands (badly repaired pinpoint who might be helped DNA can lead to uncontrolled by an abandoned drug, a phar- cancerous growth). Here, too, maceutical company might the outlier finding may lead to have to do just one or two fur- a new treatment, since about ther studies to get that drug 4 percent of the other tumors approved for routine use. Solit has looked at have muta- The future might look some- tions that affect part of the thing like what’s been gomg on RADS50 complex. “To look at for several years at the Genome these individuals’ cancers can Institute of Washington Univer- tell us a lot more than just a sity, where genome sequenc- Ra random case of cancer,” says ing is being used to help people Solit. “The