The College Fix

Dr. Anil Potti has focused much of his research on developing genomic approaches that promise to help doctors find better ways to fight cancer.

In 2006, Potti and a team of researchers introduced a new method of predicting how individual patients would respond to chemotherapy drugs based on genomic tests. In many cases, doctors may not be able to predict which cancer-fighting drug a patient will respond to best, but Potti’s approach, published in the Nature Medicine journal, potentially offered a solution.

Potti, an associate professor in the Department of Medicine and the Institute for Genome Sciences and Policy, and his collaborators described genomic signatures, or models they had developed that could predict individual patient responses to various chemotherapeutic drugs. In addition, they claimed to have developed a strategy to create a treatment plan “in a way that best matches the characteristics of the individual,” according to the paper.

“Part of what people are really trying to do in cancer therapy is [figure out] how can we decide ahead of time what is the best therapy for a given patient,” said Gary Rosner, director of Oncology Biostatics at Johns Hopkins University’s Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center. “That would be a really big step.”

Soon after the paper was published, however, biostatisticians Keith Baggerly and Kevin Coombes became concerned with the validity of Potti’s work.

[…] Upon reviewing the experiments, Baggerly and Coombes, both associate professors of bioinformatics and computational biology at MD Anderson, found many of the details vague, which made it difficult to replicate Potti’s findings.

Read the full story at the Duke Chronicle.

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