The FIRST-Dx Study Takes Steps Toward Personalized Cancer Therapy

Abstract

As with virtually all medical progress, the ability to diagnose a disease or the causes of a condition has preceded our capability to treat it, sometimes for many years. Examples that come to mind are HIV/AIDS and human papillomavirus-induced cervical cancer, for which effective therapies only became available decades later. Likewise, individual genetic aberrations associated with, if not directly causing, cancer, such as KRAS and BRAF, have been known for many years. Since the initial decoding of the whole human genome and the advent of next generation sequencing (NGS), 1