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Inflammatory myofibroblastic tumor (IMT) is a distinctive mesenchymal neoplasm characterized by a spindle-cell proliferation with an inflammatory infiltrate. Approximately half of IMTs carry rearrangements of the anaplastic lymphoma kinase (ALK) locus on chromosome 2p23, causing aberrant ALK expression. We report a sustained partial response to the ALK inhibitor crizotinib (PF-02341066, Pfizer) in a patient with ALK-translocated IMT, as compared with no observed activity in another patient without the ALK translocation. These results support the dependence of ALK-rearranged tumors on ALK-mediated signaling and suggest a therapeutic strategy for genomically identified patients with the aggressive form of this soft-tissue tumor. (Funded by Pfizer and others; ClinicalTrials.gov number, NCT00585195.).
Butrynski et al. (Wed,) studied this question.