NCI Staff
Researchers who study exceptional responders—patients who have dramatic and long-lasting responses to treatments for cancer that were not effective for most similar patients—met recently to exchange ideas and discuss the state of the science in this emerging field.
The NCI-sponsored meeting, held May 11 at NCI’s Shady Grove campus in Rockville, Maryland, featured updates on the Exceptional Responders Initiative, a pilot study that aims to gain insights into the biological mechanisms that give rise to these unusual responses to treatments.
In the NCI study, patient samples are analyzed by investigators at the Baylor College of Medicine Human Genome Sequencing Center and the cancer genomics company Foundation Medicine. This process includes sequencing DNA and RNA, as well as assessing the number of copies of certain DNA segments.