A recent meeting of researchers at The National Cancer Institute (NCI) detailed updates on the Exceptional Responders Initiative, a program created to gain insights into the emerging field of exceptional responders in cancer (patients who have a major and long-lasting response to treatments that were not nearly as effective for similar patients). The NCI has just written up a summary of the developing pilot study.

The researchers hope to analyze tumors from these exceptional responders in order to see how their responses to treatment might reveal “biomarkers that could be used to predict responses to the same or similar treatments in other patients.” The tumors will be sequenced and the data will be available through the Genomic Data Commons for other researchers to use. The group, including Dr. David Solit of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, hopes to identify “molecular changes in tumor samples that may help explain why a treatment was so effective for a given patient.”