Generate an explanation for the given claim using the provided supporting material from the paragraph. Please consider the following points while generating an output. 1) The claim will always have supporting proof in the paragraph, and the paragraph will have a clear point of view supporting the claim. 2) There can be instances where direct correlation to the claim is not available. Make use of the sentences in the paragraph to provide a corresponding output supporting the claim. 3) The explanation should be at least one and at most twelve sentences long.
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Question: Paragraph: The trial results on patients with a gene anomaly known as NTRK fusion, which occurs in less than 1 percent across a range of tumor types, were presented at the annual congress of the European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO) in Munich on Sunday. Germany’s Bayer and U.S. partner Loxo, in turn, released data for their rival compound larotrectinib, which slightly improved on previous high-efficacy readings in an enlarged trial. Traditionally, oncologists have made treatment decisions based on where in the body a tumor started, increasingly helped by the growing knowledge of cancer’s complex genetic drivers. Under the tumor-agnostic approach, also known as pan-tumor, drugmakers skip the organ-of-origin perspective and regroup patients based only on signature genetic mutations, but success in real life will depend on the fast spread of comprehensive gene-sequencing tools for tissue samples. Individually, the mutations are so rare that cancer units are seen as unlikely to run dedicated tests for each. Roche’s Foundation Medicine supplies the comprehensive kits, competing with Thermo Fisher Scientific and Caris Life Sciences. “It’s one of the reasons we acquired Foundation Medicine, to make this comprehensive genomic profiling routine and upfront in the course of the disease,” said Daniel O’Day, the head of Roche’s Pharmaceuticals division. Loxo’s larotrectinib pill, co-developed with Bayer, was last year shown to shrink tumors in 75 percent of patients with the NTRK fusion gene anomaly, occurring in the lung, pancreas, or more than a dozen other organs. On Sunday, the response rate to larotrectinib within an enlarged group of 122 trial participants - up from 55 initially and now spanning 24 tumor types - was shown to be 81 percent. Roche said the readings from the two NTRK fusion trials were not comparable because they are made up of different patient types. Loxo’s study, for instance, included some cancers in children, while Roche plans to investigate those separately. The Roche compound is designed to tackle several oncogenic mutations and last month, it unveiled data here on entrectinib pushing back tumors in 77 percent of lung cancer patients with a mutation called ROS1. Merck & Co’s Keytruda in May last year became the first drug to win approval for pan-tumor use, though that remains a relatively small market for the mega-selling drug. Bayer and Loxo are testing a second pan-tumor drug, LOXO-195. Roche Pharmaceutical’s O’Day welcomed a wider field. “Both things have to happen: You need genomic profiling and you need enough targeted medicines to encourage physicians to make that diagnosis upfront very complete. This is the world we’re entering,” he said. Though response rates could encourage a race for more such drugs, the need for suitable gene mutations or fusions will be a tall order, said oncologist Ulrik Lassen of Copenhagen’s Rigshospitalet, who co-authored the larotrectinib study. “You need to screen a lot of patients to find the needle in the haystack and the method is complicated, costly and time-consuming. When we get better at using these technologies, we can find more oncogenic fusions and companies will be smart enough to find the agents that target them.”  Roche acquired entrectinib as part of its takeover deal with U.S. cancer drug specialist Ignyta Inc for $1.7 billion, agreed in December last year. Immuno-oncology remains another major business area for Roche, which also released positive results on using its Tecentriq drug in a group of breast cancer patients with a particularly poor prognosis. Claim: Roche takes on Loxo, Bayer in gene-defined cancer class.

Answer: Roche’s entrectinib cancer pill was shown to shrink tumors in 57 percent of patients within a group that can only be identified via genetic profiling, as the Swiss drugmaker challenges an alliance of Bayer and Loxo Oncology in a new targeted treatment area.


Question: Paragraph: Analysis of powdered samples drilled out from inside an ancient and once water-soaked rock at the rover’s Gale Crater landing site show clays, sulfates and other minerals that are all key to life, scientists told reporters at NASA headquarters in Washington and on a conference call on Tuesday. The water that once flowed through the area, known as Yellowknife Bay, was likely drinkable, said Curiosity’s lead scientist John Grotzinger, who is with the California Institute of Technology. The analysis stopped short of a confirmation of organics, which are key to most Earth-like life. But with 17 months left in the rover’s primary mission, scientists said they expect to delve further into that question. Science operations currently are suspended because of a computer glitch, which is expected to be resolved this week. Whether or not Mars has or ever had life, it should have at one time at least had organic compounds delivered to its surface by organic-rich comets and asteroids. Finding places where the organics could have been preserved, however, is a much trickier prospect than finding the environmental niches and chemistry needed to support life, scientists said. In May, following a one-month interruption of radio communications caused by the positions of Earth and Mars, scientists plan to drill a second hole into the Gale Crater rock to look for organic compounds. “If there was organic material there, it could have been preserved,” said David Blake, principal investigator for Curiosity’s Chemistry and Mineralogy, or CheMin, experiment. A lack of organics, however, would not rule out the Yellowknife Bay site as suitable for life, scientists added. “You don’t have to have carbon present in a geological environment that’s habitable in order to have microbial metabolism occur,” Grotzinger said. Some micro-organisms on Earth, for example, can feed on inorganic compounds, such as what are found inside rocks. “There does need to be a source of carbon somewhere, but if it’s just CO2 (carbon dioxide), you can have chemoautotrophic organisms that literally feed on rocks and they will metabolize and generate organic compounds based on that carbon,” Grotzinger said. Analysis shows the Gale Crater rock contains carbon dioxide, in addition to hydrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, sulfur and nitrogen. Carbon dioxide provides a key ingredient in the building blocks for life, all of which have now been found in the Mars rock sample, Grotzinger said. The $2.5 billion, nuclear-powered Curiosity rover landed inside the giant Gale Crater impact basin, located near the Martian equator, on August 6 for a two-year mission. Scientists were drawn to the area because of a three-mile (5-km) mountain of sediment, called Mount Sharp, rising from the crater floor. But shortly after the rover’s landing, the team decided to first explore the Yellowknife Bay area, located in the opposite direction from Mount Sharp. Observations from Mars orbiters showed three different types of terrain coming together in Yellowknife Bay, plus a low elevation, all hints that water could have once flowed and pooled on the surface. That hunch was verified with the first chemical analysis of material drilled out from inside what appears to be a slab of bedrock, named John Klein, after a mission manager who died in 2011. Scientists don’t know the rock’s age, nor how it formed. They suspect, however, that the John Klein rock is at least 3 billion years old and that it spent enough time in non-acidic and not-too-salty water for various telltale clays and minerals to form. “This rock, quite frankly, looks like a typical thing that we would get on Earth,” Grotzinger said. “The key thing here is this is an environment that microbes could have lived in and maybe even prospered in.”  The habitable conditions in Yellowknife Bay appear to roughly coincide within a couple of hundred million years of the first evidence for life on Earth. “On Earth, finding organics in very, very ancient rocks is a difficult proposition,” said Paul Mahaffy, principal investigator for Curiosity’s Sample Analysis at Mars, or SAM, instrument. Finding organics on Mars may be even more challenging. Without much protection from an atmosphere, ultraviolet and cosmic radiation can destroy organics. Mars also apparently is covered with chemicals, known as perchlorates, that consume organics. “The search for organic carbon is an issue for this mission and you want to do this as deliberately as possible. You don’t just want to wander around and try stuff out,” Grotzinger said. Knowing that Mars at least had the ingredients for life, however, makes the search for organics more viable. “This is not a simple problem, but I think the mission is up to it and we’re really excited to get started on that now,” Grotzinger said. Claim: Mars had the right stuff for life, scientists find.

Answer: Seven months after NASA’s rover Curiosity landed on Mars to assess if the planet most like Earth had the ingredients for life, scientists have their answer: Yes.


Question: Paragraph: McGoldrick said 29,000 Palestinians had been wounded in protests in the past year, and 7,000 of them had gunshot wounds, mostly in the lower legs. “You’ve got 1,700 people who are in need of serious, complicated surgeries for them to be able to walk again,” McGoldrick said. “These are people who have been shot during the demonstrations and who are in need of rehabilitation, and very, very serious and complex bone reconstruction surgery over a two year period before they start to rehabilitate themselves.”  Without those procedures, all these people are at risk of needing an amputation, he said. The U.N. is seeking $20 million to fill the gap in health spending. A lack of funding to the World Food Program and UNRWA, the U.N. humanitarian agency that supports Palestinians displaced by the 1948 war of Israel’s founding, also meant there could be an interruption of food supplies for 1 million people. “If that stops, there is no alternative for people to bring food in from any other sources, because they don’t have purchasing power,” McGoldrick said. WFP spokesman Herve Verhoosel said a severe lack of funds meant WFP had cut aid for 193,000 people this year in the West Bank and Gaza, with 27,000 getting nothing and the rest getting only $8 per month instead of the usual $10. Some 2 million Palestinians live in Gaza, the economy of which has suffered years of Israeli and Egyptian blockades as well as recent foreign aid cuts and sanctions by the Palestinian Authority, Hamas’ West Bank-based rival. People’s prospects were “precarious”, McGoldrick said. Gaza families averaged $4,000 of debt, while salaries averaged $400 per month, but 54 percent of the population was unemployed. The health system was impoverished, with unpaid salaries and dilapidated equipment, and many medical professionals had left if they could find opportunities elsewhere. One teaching hospital was now only teaching trauma medicine, McGoldrick said, but the doctors on the ground did not have the technical ability to carry out the treatment required for the people at risk of amputation. There have already been 120 amputations, 20 of them in children, in the past year, he said. Claim: Health funding gap means 1,700 in Gaza may face amputations: U.N.

Answer:
A lack of health funding in Gaza means 1,700 people shot by Israeli security forces may have to have amputations in the next two years, Jamie McGoldrick, the U.N. Humanitarian Coordinator for occupied Palestinian territory, told reporters on Wednesday.