Predictive markers of BRAF targeted therapy effectiveness!

 

Title first because - by page 2 I was thinking - 

1)  Can I get another espresso without waking my kid or his puppy up? 

and 

2) What a weird and crappy experimental design! I do need that espresso because I'm clearly misreading Table 1. 

24 solid tumors were analyzed? Across both sexes and a wide age range? They are all tumors? Like no healthy matched controls? Wait - are those tumors from different organs? Weird, right? 

The reason I'm continuing to type isn't (solely) because I'm procrastinating on 10 things I need to be doing. I'm continuing to type because it fucking worked! 

The question was totally a spotlight into the dark to illuminate an important area. The question is something like: We give people these BRAF targeted therapeutics when we find a BRAF 600E mutation and we don't know anything else about whether that's was the best idea or how well it would work. So they had this small set of frozen tumors from people who had this BRAF targeted therapy and they did RNASeq and proteomics (TIMSTOF) on them. They also know what regimen of drugs the patients were on and how well the regimen worked as broken down in how long the therapy kept the cancer from recurring.

The RNASeq pointed out a bunch of mutations but - no surprise to anyone here - it doesn't appear to have pointed out a protein that appears to coincide, maybe even correlate (unclear), with the time that the patient was in remission.

I guess the lesson here is something like - look - sometimes samples are super precious and you just don't have the numbers to assemble a cohort that makes sense - that doesn't mean you shouldn't take a look?