Prediction of anticancer drug response by transcriptome analysis. The new pathways of pharmacogenomics

Abstract

Predicting drug response is a challenging problem in oncology. Between 1975-1985, important efforts were devoted to the generation of cellular assays able to predict, on an individual basis, the in vitro response of tumour cells to chemotherapeutic agents, but such methods could not be adopted in routine. New molecular biology techniques have been developed in order to identify the genes involved in drug sensitivity and resistance. The availability of techniques of gene expression profiling has allowed to establish correlations between gene expression and drug sensitivity of tumour cells or human cancers. This type of approach has been initiated on in vitro systems by the National Cancer Institute (NCI) in the USA and is pursued by a growing number of public and private laboratories around the world. In the clinical setting, gene expression profiles are currently developed for the diagnosis and overall prognosis of human cancers, but should rapidly allow the prediction of drug response, so that clinicians would be able to prescribe individual treatments on a rational basis.