Testing the Metal of ERCC2 in predicting the response to platinum-based therapy

Abstract

DNA repair has been shown to affect the cellular response to platinum-based therapy in a variety of cancers; however, translating this knowledge to the clinic has proven diffi cult and yielded mixed results. In this issue of Cancer Discovery , Van Allen and colleagues have analyzed responders and nonresponders to neoadjuvant platinum-based therapy with locally advanced urothelial cancer and identifi ed a series of mutations in the nucleotide excision repair (NER) gene ERCC2 that correlate with the response to platinum-based therapy. This work provides evidence that defects in NER can be exploited to maximize the effi cacy of conventional platinumbased chemotherapy.