Personalized Medicine in Cancer Chemotherapy

Personalized medicine is used to learn about a person"s genetic makeup and how their tumor grows. Personalized medicine simply means the prescription of specific therapeutics best suited for an individual. Personalization of cancer therapies is based on a better understanding of the disease at the molecular level. The field of cytopathology has evolved from basic Pap staining of tumors to the use of immune cytochemistry and complementary ancillary molecular diagnostics to aid in specifying the disease. This "personalized" approach to diagnosis allows the clinician to provide therapy based on specific genetic mutations of the tumors from their patients. The FDA has dramatically increased the number of approved in vitro assays for patients with genetic mutations that respond to drugs that prevent the expression of the mutations, such as tyrosine kinase inhibitors. These alternative forms of therapy have dramatically increased the survival rate in patients with stage four and metastatic cancer.