Researchers have compared the genetic information of tumor and normal tissue from patients. These patients had a variety of cancers, including breast, brain, renal, gastric, lung, pancreatic, and blood cancers and melanoma.
Three-quarters of patients had genetic mutations for which approved therapies or clinical trials had been designed, suggesting that DNA analysis could steer these people to targeted therapy.
As a part of the patient's normal inherited genetic variation, they were false positives. Which made to looks pecifically at mutations in genes for which some kind of drug or cancer therapy has already been identified. They found that nearly a third of these changes also were false positives and harmless genetic variations that had nothing to do with a cancer. Patient is multiple harmless genetic mutations. Overall false positives affected almost one in every two patients.
Based on these findings, the Translational researchers argued that doctors should begin obtaining DNA analysis of both normal and cancer tissue from patients. That would allow doctors to screen out normal genetic variations and more accurately determine the causes of a person's cancer.