FDA-Approved Biomarker Panels: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

Here at Amplion we are currently thinking very hard about how to represent in BiomarkerBase the ways in which emerging biomarkers are naturally grouping into panels, based on how they are used in clinical trials, described in the literature, and appear in clinical...

Breast Cancer Tests Betray ‘Precision Medicine’ Branding

Yes, President Obama’s new $215 million Precision Medicine Initiative supports important science, but it also bolsters biotech branding in a way the science doesn’t always support. To understand why clinical genomics (a more neutral descriptor) isn’t quite as reliably...

BRCA1 and BRCA2 Now Validated for Companion Diagnostic Use

BRCA1 and BRCA2 have been considered important risk factor biomarkers for breast cancer since at least the release of Myriad’sBRACAnalysis™ test in 1996, but to-date they have only been used for identifying people who are at high risk of developing breast...

FDA Approves Blinatumomab for Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia

Good news regarding a new personalized cancer therapy that has just been approved after showing very strong efficacy during clinical trials. Blinatumomab is a novel CD19-directed immunotherapy from Amgen that is a great example of personalized medicine in action. It...

NY-ESO-1, An Emerging Biomarker for Ovarian Cancer

In a previous post I questioned whether ovarian cancer is being under-served by personalized medicine, and promised to dig a bit deeper into some of the advancements that ARE being made for this disease. The first pass has been to look at targeted therapeutics, and...