New Research Calls for Sex-Specific Therapies for Thyroid, Head and Neck Cancer

As an example, Dr. Liang cited one of the findings in his co-authored study published recently in Cancer Cell (2016;29:711-722). In the study, the gene SRC appeared to have a much higher protein expression level in females than in males with head and neck cancers.

However, Dr. Liang reported that “two recent dasatinib-driven clinical trials in this disease failed, and this might have been due to the small proportion of female patients recruited in these studies. For early-stage clinical trials involving a target gene with a sex-biased signature, a sex-specific trial may be more likely to succeed.”—LK