The age of personalized medicine is rapidly approaching...
In a paper in BMC Cancer recently published by Hjortland et al., a pilot case of trying to identify molecular tumor alterations as potential targets for therapy is demonstrated.
When cancer hits a patient, this is a consequence of genetic changes, or mutations, in the cells of the patient. The genetic changes in a given tumor may vary in number and type between both tumor types and individual tumors. Commonly used cancer therapies, such as chemotherapy and radiation therapy, were originally developed to exploit general features of tumor, and were not tailored for the specific molecular changes in each tumor. The idea of analyzing each individual tumor in a cancer patient to find the best drugs to target the tumor of that particular patient, is an exiting new possibility that is now gradually becoming feasible. Extensive testing of the patient’s tumor may reveal new potential targets for cancer therapy, and may in the future provide predictive information of cancer therapy options, often referred as “personalized medicine”.