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Implications of personalized medicine—perspective from a cancer center

Nature Reviews Clinical Oncology volume 8, pages 177–183 (2011)Cite this article

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Abstract

Three advances are dramatically changing the landscape of oncology. First, hundreds of drugs are available that inhibit targets involved in oncogenesis. Second, efforts to reclassify malignant diseases are expanding the number of orphan molecular diseases. Third, the implementation of high-throughput technologies will allow risk of relapse prediction and drug sensitivity. Patients predicted to relapse will be referred to comprehensive cancer centers where new drugs will be tested. It is anticipated that a high number of small, biology-driven clinical trials will report high sensitivity to targeted agents in rare biologically defined diseases. Drug registration and biomarker analysis needs to be revisited to avoid large phase III trials with control arms. The use of high-throughput technologies will lead to the development of virtual cells. These considerations highlight the need for developing a consortium of comprehensive cancer centers to run clinical trials in rare, molecularly-defined populations, and implement high-throughput technologies for daily practice.

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Figure 1: Molecular predictors of cancer death: breast cancer illustration.
Figure 2: Short-term future of drug development in the era of molecular medicine.
Figure 3: Clinical trials in the era of molecular medicine: test the predictor, not the drug.
Figure 4: Clinical developments for different stage cancers.

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Acknowledgements

We thank E. Robinson, from Complete Medical Communications, for help with figure preparation and English language editing, which was funded by the Institute Gustave Roussy.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Medical Oncology and INSERM U981, Institut Gustave Roussy, 39 Rue Camilles Desmoulins, 94805, Villejuif, France

    Thomas Tursz, Fabrice Andre & Jean-Charles Soria

  2. Institut Genomic Unit, Institut Gustave Roussy, 39 Rue Camilles Desmoulins, 94805, Villejuif, France

    Vladimir Lazar

  3. Department of Translational Research, Institut Gustave Roussy, 39 Rue Camilles Desmoulins, 94805, Villejuif, France

    Ludovic Lacroix

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Contributions

T. Tursz, F. Andre, V. Lazar, L. Lacroix and J.-C. Soria all contributed to researching the data for this article, to discussions relating to the article content, writing and reviewing/editing of the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Fabrice Andre.

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Tursz, T., Andre, F., Lazar, V. et al. Implications of personalized medicine—perspective from a cancer center. Nat Rev Clin Oncol 8, 177–183 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1038/nrclinonc.2010.222

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