Painting Cancer's Personalized Portrait

A startup company called Foundation Medicine plans to develop a lab test for doctors to analyze patient cancer samples, to determine the genetic mutations that lead to cancer, which could guide doctors in choosing the best treatment options for their patients, according to MIT's Technology Review. "As a start, the test would focus on 100 genes that have been shown scientifically to play a role in cancer treatment and progression," the Review's Courtney Humphries writes. "And over the long term, the hope is to expand to analyzing not only genes but the chemical makeup of cancer samples as well." The company says the test would cost in the low thousands, which is in line with other cancer tests of this kind.