contact	THE NEED: TRADITIONAL CANCER TREATMENTS TOO OFTEN FAIL In spite of tremendous scientific advances, radiation and chemotherapy still often fail as first-line treatments for many common cancers. Subsequent tumor resistance forces second-line treatments that are poorly effective and present severe side effects. Decades of effort in clinical oncology have revealed tremendous patient-to-patient variation regarding the success of standard treatments. But until now, little was known of the causes of these disparities. DNAR gives physicians new tools to optimize treatment selection based on the characteristics of an individual patient’s tumor, resulting in better treatment outcomes. UNDERSTANDING TUMOR HETEROGENEITY: THE KEY TO OPTIMIZING THERAPY SELECTION It is known that sensitivity or resistance of a given tumor to a particular therapy varies based upon the activity of specific pathways and processes. One process central to the genesis of cancer — and how well a tumor responds to treatment — is DNA repair. It has been shown that DNA-repair pathways act differently in tumors than they do in normal tissue, and that there is great variability between tumors, even those of the same type. Now, knowledge of the status of the six major DNA-repair pathways and their relevant cellular processes in individual tumors can be applied to help oncologists make highly informed treatment decisions, personalized to the needs of individual patients. DYNAMIC BIOMARKERS TO MEASURE PATHWAY ACTIVITY A great deal of energy is expended looking for specific gene defects in cancers. It is increasingly clear that the functional impact of these defects is the activation or deactivation of specific pathways or processes, involving different proteins often by post-translational changes. As a result, pathway analysis promises more useful information than gene expression or gene testing alone. DNAR is developing proteomic biomarkers that dynamically measure whether a critical pathway or process is active or not at a specific point in time. These biomarkers are being evaluated in clinical studies to correlate pathway status with clinical outcomes related to specific therapies.