Oncology Research Today is a free monthly online journal that collates and summarizes the latest research about Oncology, including details on cancer, surgery, chemotherapy, radiotherapy.

Is tailored therapy feasible in oncology?

Gasparini G, Longo R, Torino F, Gattuso D, Morabito A, Toffoli G

Division of Medical Oncology, Azienda Complesso Ospedaliero di Rilevanza Nazionale S. Filippo Neri Hospital, via G. Martinotti 20, 00135 Rome, Italy. gasparini.oncology@tiscalinet.it

Tailored therapy aims to cure a patient who suffers from a specific disease with an effective and safe drug, based on the complex interactions among patient's characteristics, disease physiopathology and drug metabolism. Genomic and proteomic technologies represent promising new useful tools to understand cancer biology and molecular basis of interindividual differences of anticancer drugs efficacy. Genomic profiling seems to be able to re-classifying cancer into new molecular and prognostic homogeneous subgroups. By individual polymorphisms it is possible to identify the patients at higher risk for severe toxicity from those that may gain benefit from a particular treatment. The clinical use of targeted therapy is hampered by several questions, including: optimal biological dose, availability of surrogate biomarkers predictive of activity, schedule of administration, tumor histotype and stage to treat and modalities of combination with chemo/radiotherapy. In addition, further efforts are needed to improve the reliability of genomic and proteomic technologies. These unsolved issues presently make tailored therapy an open challenge.

Published 20 December 2005 in Crit Rev Oncol Hematol, 57(1): 79-101.
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