Rafael Vargas Alves, Vice-President at the Federal University of Health Sciences of Porto Alegre, shared on LinkedIn:
“For a long time, cancer treatment was mainly defined by the organ where the tumor appeared: breast, lung, intestine, prostate…
This remains a fundamental point, but today we know that two patients with the same type of cancer can have biologically very different tumors.
A good example is lung cancer. Tumors that arise in the same organ and may even look similar under the microscope may have different molecular changes, such as EGFR, ALK, ROS1, BRAF, or KRAS. Identifying these characteristics can significantly change the treatment strategy, including, in some cases, the indication of specific targeted therapies.
This is precisely where concepts such as biomarkers, molecular profiling and precision medicine come in.
This information helps to better understand the biology of that tumor and, when evidence is available, to identify which treatments are most likely to offer benefit.
This does not mean, however, that every patient needs to perform a large number of molecular tests. The indication depends on the type and stage of cancer, clinical characteristics, and the scientific evidence available for each situation.
Personalized medicine does not mean creating a different treatment from scratch for each person. It means using the available information to make increasingly accurate decisions about which strategy makes the most sense for that patient and for that tumor.
Increasingly, the question is no longer just ‘where is the cancer?’ and also goes through ‘what are the characteristics of this cancer?’
References:
- National Cancer Institute (NCI). Biomarker Testing for Cancer Treatment.
- National Cancer Institute (NCI). Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer Treatment.
- European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO). Precision Medicine Glossary.”
Other articles about Precision Medicine on OncoDaily.