Clinical Utility of an Ex Vivo Functional Test in Personalized Cancer Treatment

Background/Objectives: Providing optimized and accurate treatment to cancer patients remains a major challenge in oncology care. The emergence of precision medicine tools to match the correct therapy to the patient has significantly advanced treatment modalities in the last few years. While genomics has been shown to be critical in selecting targeted therapies for a specific somatic mutation, the overall clinical benefit of broad genomic sequencing has been found lacking. Here, we evaluate the utility of our previously clinically validated ex vivo functional assay across different treatment scenarios, demonstrating its ability to transform predicted non-responders into predicted responders, rule out ineffective treatments, provide multiple treatment options, and validate physician choices. Methods: The evaluation was performed on a post-market surveillance study analyzing 312 patients, from which 278 patients had successful test reports (an 89.1% test success rate), with clinical outcomes available from 45 of those patients. Results: We show that in the group of patients with clinical response data, the tests yield a PPV of 91.18% and NPV of 90.91% with clinical utility impacting physician decision in 51.1% of cases. Further analysis of the entire cohort showed the potential of clinical utility to reach up to 59.3% on a large group of patients. Conclusions: The accurate prediction of patient response using the test suggests the potential for the platform to improve patient treatment in clinical practice by reducing ineffective drug use and optimizing personalized patient drug regiments.