At least year’s meeting Ankur R Parikh, DO, the medical director of precision medicine at CTCA Philadelphia, led the conversation on the role of next-generation sequencing (NGS) in oncology today. Dr. Parikh discussed how NGS and massively parallel sequencing have led to improved patient care through personalized diagnoses, prognoses, and therapy selection. Since the Human Genome Project was completed in 2003 the cost of genomic sequencing has radically decreased and become much more widely available.
Today, genetic testing can be used to identify biomarkers used for therapy selection or detect resistance mutations as they develop, directing the course of subsequent treatments. Parikh remarked that precision medicine and NGS achieved another milestone in 2017 with the biomarker specific approval for MSI-High solid tumors of pembrolizumab: “Moving forward we’re going to see this more. We’re going to get treatment options based on actual molecular profiling instead of site of origin.” Overall, “the future of NGS is very bright,” remarked Parikh.