Researchers from Harvard Medical School have developed a new dynamic analysis method called DBP, which is used to predict cancer response to chemotherapy. This development may improve the effectiveness of specialized chemotherapy medicine against cancer and be very important in the development of personalized therapeutic treatment . The study was published in Cell.

A fundamental challenge across is medicine to assign to a patient the drug or combination of drugs that will be of greatest benefit. In oncology, this choice has historically been driven by the anatomic location and histology of the tumor. There is a lack of effective predictive biomarkers to precisely assign optimal therapy to cancer patients. While most efforts are directed at inferring drug response phenotype based on genotype, there is very focused and useful phenotypic information to be gained from directly perturbing the patient’s living cancer cell with the drug in question

In this study, to satisfy this unmet need, scientists developed the Dynamic BH3 profiling(DBP) technique to measure early changes in net proapoptotic signaling at the mitochondrion induced by chemotherapeutic agents in cancer cells, not requiring prolonger ex vivo culture.

They find in cell line and clinical experiments that early drug-induced death signaling measured by Dynamic BH3 Profiling predicts chemotherapy response across many cancer types and many agents, including combinations of chemotherapies.

The Dynamic BH3 Profiling can be used as a broadly applicable predictive biomarker to predict cytotoxic response of cancers to chemotherapeutics in vivo.