VIEWS IN THE SPOTLIGHT Personalized Therapy for Acute Myeloid Leukemia

Summary: Patient-specifi c ex vivo drug sensitivity and resistance screening can identify rational drug candidates for the testing of personalized targeted therapy. An iterative approach of genomic and drug susceptibility char-acterization at sequential time points during clinical trials of targeted therapy in acute myeloid leukemia may be useful both for characterizing mechanisms of resistance and clonal evolution and also for identifi cation of novel therapeutic targets and drug combinations. Cancer Discov; 3(12); 1336–8. ©2013 AACR. See related article by Pemovska et al., p. 1416 (9). Over the past 5 years, the application of advances in genetic sequencing technology, analysis, and interpreta-tion has revolutionized our understanding of acute mye-loid leukemia (AML) biology ( 1–3). Knowledge of somatic mutations in AML has already demonstrated clinical relevance by improving our ability to determine prog-nosis using pretreatment risk stratifi cation ( 4) and/or high-sensitivity measurements of disease burden ( 5). Unfortu-nately, this information has had minimal impact therapeu