Preliminary findings from the first clinical trial in lung cancer to use molecular analysis of tumor biopsy samples and an “adaptive” design to direct patients to a specific targeted therapy were presented at the AACR annual meeting in Washington, DC. In the study, dubbed BATTLE, patients had their tumor samples tested for specific biomarkers and were enrolled into one of four treatment arms, each one testing a different targeted therapy, based on that analysis. (See the box below.)

The first 97 patients to enroll in BATTLE were randomly assigned to one of the four treatment arms as would traditionally be done. After that point, new patients were assigned to one of the arms based on a statistical model called an adaptive Bayesian model. In addition to using the result of the biomarker analysis, the model made the assignment based on findings from patients who had already undergone treatment, which, as the trial proceeds, are fed back into the model.