Pancreatic cancer is relatively uncommon, with a lifetime risk of ~1.5% for individuals in the United States. For the majority of pancreatic cancers, the cause is unknown and there is no known family history of the disease. In these circumstances, a cancer is...
A woman’s physician ordered multi-gene panel testing due to her family history of cancer and told her that the lab had found two “errors” in the PALB2 gene. Compared to the general population, patients with a pathogenic variant in PALB2 have between...
A 42-year-old woman underwent a breast biopsy due to an abnormal mammogram. Even though the biopsy analysis yielded benign findings, the woman’s family history with pancreatic cancer prompted the surgeon to order a 70-gene panel test to assess if she had...
Paired tumor/germline testing is far from standard practice in cancer care, but some experts in the field are advocating that when patients have their tumors genomically profiled to determine precision medicine options, that is an opportunity to also evaluate them for...
In 2019, the field of personalized medicine continued to grow with the market launch of more than two dozen drugs targeting novel genomic alterations and numerous genetic tests to determine whether patients are at risk for serious diseases like cancer, and whether...
