Functional Precision Medicine Provides Clinical Benefit in Advanced Aggressive Hematological Cancers and Identifies Exceptional Responders.

Personalized medicine aims to match the right drug with the right patient by utilizing specific features of the individual patients' tumor. However, current strategies of personalized therapy matching only provide treatment opportunities for less than 10% of cancer patients. A promising method may be drug profiling of patient biopsies with single-cell resolution to directly quantify drug effects. We prospectively tested an image-based single-cell functional precision medicine (scFPM) approach to guide treatments in 143 patients with advanced aggressive hematologic cancers. Fifty-six patients (39%) were treated according to scFPM results. At a median follow-up of 23.9 months, 30 patients (54%) demonstrated a clinical benefit of more than 1.3-fold enhanced progression-free survival (PFS) compared to their previous therapy. Twelve patients (40% of responders) experienced exceptional responses lasting three times longer than expected for their respective disease. We conclude, that therapy matching by scFPM is clinically feasible, and effective in advanced aggressive hematologic cancers.