Dr. Alec Kimmelman explains how the findings of the Center for Molecular Oncology will help patients across all of NYU Langone.
Credit: Juliana Thomas
A groundbreaking initiative at NYU Langone Health’s Perlmutter Cancer Center is helping doctors personalize care for people with solid tumors and blood cancer, and it may lead to the development of novel cancer therapies.
In an interview with the publishers of STAT News, Alec Kimmelman, MD, PhD, director of the Laura and Isaac Perlmutter Cancer Center at NYU Langone, describes the molecular oncology program being managed through the new Center for Molecular Oncology and its benefits to patients institution-wide.
How does molecular oncology differ from traditional cancer treatment methods?
Traditionally, you have a biopsy of a patient’s tumor. You look at it under the microscope, you assess what it is, and then you make your treatment plan. We still do all of that—that is still an incredibly important part of cancer care.
Molecular oncology is a relatively new program that we’ve launched here. It’s at the forefront of how we determine very specific things about a patient’s tumor.
With liquid biopsy, “instead of having to do surgical procedures to get pieces of the tumor, you can just draw a tube of blood … we can sequence that, and we can determine the mutational profile of the tumor.”
What tools do you use to determine the biology of a tumor?
By sequencing the tumor, we look for mutations in certain genes that may be driving the tumor or making it more sensitive to different drugs. We can also determine whether a patient would be a candidate for a particular clinical trial.
Our molecular oncology group is also harnessing information from liquid biopsies. So instead of having to do surgical procedures to get pieces of the tumor, you can just draw a tube of blood, just like you would in the clinic when you’re doing a complete blood count. We can sequence that, and we can determine the mutational profile of the tumor.
What makes the program at NYU Langone unique?
We have a single medical record at every single clinic and every single hospital. So that integration is a very key component of this. It allows us to offer this service everywhere that we are, and to integrate the data from the patient.
Every patient will have various imaging studies. They’ll also have regular pathology, they’ll have the tumor sequencing, they’ll have the liquid biopsies. And our investment in infrastructure allows us to put all that data together to make the best-informed treatment decision for a patient.
It also allows us to discover the next generation of therapies, because we’ll be able to study what happens in all these patients. It’ll provide us with an incredible amount of data to learn for the future.
