Molecular Tumor Boards: current practice and future needs

Due to rapid technical advances, steeply declining sequencing costs, and the ever-increasing number of targeted therapies, it can be expected that extensive tumor sequencing such as whole-exome and whole-genome sequencing will soon be applied in standard care. Clinicians will thus be confronted with increasingly complex genetic information and multiple test-platforms to choose from. General medical training, meanwhile, can hardly keep up with the pace of innovation. Consequently, there is a rapidly growing gap between clinical knowledge and genetic potential in cancer care. Multidisciplinary Molecular Tumor Boards (MTBs) have been suggested as a means to address this disparity, but shared experiences are scarce in literature and no quality requirements or guidelines have been published to date. Based on literature review, a survey among hospitals in The Netherlands, and our own experience with the establishment of a nationally operating MTB, this article evaluates current knowledge and unmet needs and lays out a strategy for successful MTB implementation. Having access to an MTB can improve and increase the application of genetics-guided cancer care. In our survey, however,