Challenges in Treating TRK Fusion Cancer

At the ESMO Congress 2019, Ulrik Lassen, MD, PhD, oncology professor at the University of Copenhagen explained the challenges in identifying and treating TRK fusion cancer in patients.

Transcript

TRK [tropomyosin receptor kinase] fusion cancer is quite rare in the common cancers. We don’t know the exact incidence, but we believe it is below 1%. So it is very difficult to find in the common cancers and we need some strategies of how to identify the patients. But then it’s very frequent in some very rare cancer, so this also complicates it. But we know, for instance, in infantile fibrosarcoma and secondary breast cancer it’s almost pathognomonic so It’s needed to state the diagnosis.