Personalizing Oncology: Perspectives and Prospects

This article provides an overview of the research, beginning a century ago, that has led to the current use of genomically informed methods for selection of targeted therapies to treat individual patients with cancer--so-called precision cancer medicine. Until 1980, most research on cancer therapy was not targeted in the sense we use the word today. Since then, there has been an acceleration in research identifying genetic and molecular targets and in clinical trials using biomarkers that identify the presence of genetic or molecular markers in a patient's cancer to select appropriate targeted therapy. This approach has been made possible by increased knowledge of the genetic pathogenesis of cancer and by increased capacity to sequence genes and genomes in clinically useful timeframes and at a reasonable cost. However, many challenges and pitfalls remain in selecting optimal targets, interpreting data on genetic aberrations, designing effective targeted drugs and antibodies, dealing with resistance to treatments, identifying appropriate combinations of therapies, and performing the complex clinical trials that are required. Future clinical research with experimental targeted agents is likely to be more informative because of appropriate preselection of patients enrolled onto trials and performance of genetic and molecular studies on specimens of a patient's cancer before and after treatment.