Anil Potti

Durham, NC - Patients with the smallest lung tumors are usually offered surgery but not chemotherapy, even though 30 percent of these early stage tumors recur after surgery.

Doctors have not had a way to know whose cancer would recur and whose wouldn't. But Assistant Professor of Medicine Anil Potti, M.D., and his colleagues at Duke University have identified unique genetic patterns in tumors that make it possible to predict which early-stage tumors are more likely to recur and should be treated more aggressively. Potti's work also dramatically improves the odds of choosing which chemotherapy drug from among the four or five choices is likely to work best for individual patients.

The genetic test has been approved for clinical trials in 50 medical centers and will involve approximately 1,200 cancer patients. But even though Potti's discovery was named one of the top science stories in 2006 by Discover magazine, he has not yet been able to obtain R01 funding.

"Identifying high-risk patients is one thing, but we're going into a patient's room and saying not only do we know that you are at high risk for your cancer coming back, but now we can tailor therapies to your particular tumor."
-- Anil Potti