By Clinical Informatics News Staff

December 9, 2016 | An article published online on JAMA Oncology’s Patient Page yesterday proposes two types of clinical trial for testing precision medicine treatments of oncology.

As we shift from categorizing cancers by their tissue of origin to their driver mutations, new types of trials are required, said Howard (Jack) West, MD. These subgroups of patients are small, though, making clinical trials challenging.

“Two new and very different trial designs for molecular targets in cancer care are umbrella trials and basket trials,” West writes. Umbrella trials take patients with the same type of cancer and assign them to different arms of a study based on their mutations. Basket trials group patients by mutation, regardless of which organs are involved.

West says the two trial types allow more patients to participate and can test treatments more quickly. They also give physicians more options for patients with rare mutations.  JAMA Oncology