Dr. Hays on Targeting Mutations in Gynecologic Cancers

John Hays, MD, assistant professor of Internal Medicine, Ohio State University Comprehensive Cancer Center, discusses how researchers are actively exploring ways to target rarer mutations in patients with gynecologic cancers.

While PARP inhibitors have become a frequent regimen for treating patients with BRCA mutations, other mutations are not easily as targetable, Hays explains. Therefore, researchers are examining how patients with gynecologic malignancies may perform in basket trials where they are paired with a targeted therapy based on their genetic abnormality.

This would be more difficult in a standard clinical trial, where researchers would have to enroll enough patients with a specific mutation, such as PI3K, and randomize them to receive a PI3K inhibitor. Basket trials would also save time from investigating therapies in an unselected patient population, followed by biomarker analyses to determine why a select amount of patients responded to a therapy, he adds.