Cedars-Sinai Cancer Launches 'Molecular Twin' Initiative for Precision Cancer Treatment

The Molecular Twin initiative also will advance cancer care and research in underserved populations and enable investigators to analyze how ethnic and racial disparities affect tumor biology and treatment among diverse populations. The Molecular Twin database will integrate and store "de-identified" clinical and molecular patient information to ensure that patients and their physicians have access to individualized cancer care strategies, risk assessments, treatments and novel clinical trials. This patient information-stripped of personal details-also will be available to researchers to offer insight into why some patients are resistant to certain therapies and provide data for potential cancer discoveries, including new treatments. "Molecular twins serve as scientific stunt doubles that are always in the lab, ready to identify the best current therapies and, perhaps, reveal important details of how a cancer will affect the patient," said Dan Theodorescu, MD, PhD, director of Cedars-Sinai Cancer, who conceived of and leads the initiative. "We hope that in the long term, the scientific convergence of multiple biologic, physical and computational datasets on thousands of patients will enable us to develop the treatments of tomorrow as we discover the circuitry used by cancer and other abnormal cells to drive the disease.