Genetic testing can now point doctors toward drugs that may work against a patient's specific tumor, but insurance coverage often has not caught up, leaving patients with rare cancers to fight for medicines approved for other conditions, KFF Health News reported this week. Taken together, rare cancers make up about a quarter of all U.S. cancers, according to the National Cancer Institute.
The report centers on Mason Henderson, a 21-year-old from southeastern Texas with a brain tumor so rare that the World Health Organization named it only in 2021. After chemotherapy failed and a clinical trial in New York City did not stop the cancer, his doctors turned to Lynparza, a drug made by AstraZeneca and Merck and approved by the FDA in 2014 for ovarian cancer, based on the genetic features of his tumor.
