Personalised Cancer Medicine: Fulfilling the Promise

Abstract

Abstract The continual increase in global cancer incidence has created a huge need for new and more effective cancer drugs. However, success is often limited by the heterogeneity among patients, which frequently leads to the failure of patients to respond to a drug together with toxic side effects. Personalised medicine uses our advancing molecular understanding of disease to provide the most efficient medical care for individual patients, depending on their unique clinical, genetic and environmental state. Various types of biomarkers assist this process by enabling prediction of clinical outcome on treatment, or measuring effect of treatment which is then correlated with a clinical endpoint. Omics technologies such as genomics, transcriptomics and proteomics are crucially important in the personalised medicine approach as they enable the analysis of multiple and large datasets to stratify patients into responder subgroups. Key Concepts: The increase in global cancer incidence calls for more effective therapies. Personalised medicine identifies patients who respond differently to treatment. Genetic and molecular heterogeneity in tumours contributes to variable treatment response. Biomarker development is crucial for personalised cancer medicine. Biomarkers can be prognostic, predictive and pharmacodynamic. Molecular imaging enables the response to treatment to be visualised. High‐throughput omics technologies allow analysis of large amounts of information on the healthy and diseased states.