Personalised Cancer Treatment

Major advancements in understanding tumours are now used to create targeted drugs that counteract specific mutations.

09:09 08 June 2016

Precision medicine, or the use of drugs that are designed to target specific weaknesses in each patient’s tumour, is one of the big themes at the annual American Society of Clinical Oncology conference. 

 

Precision medicine is built on the understanding that cancers are not all the same, not even those in the same tissue. Thus, tailored approach is needed to successfully treat individual patients.

 

Instead of automatically prescribing chemotherapy and radiotherapy that kills not just cancer cells but also healthy tissue, precision medicine aims to test every patient’s tumour to identify specific mutations that have become essential for it survival. Armed with this information, doctors can then select a targeted drug to counteract the said mutation and kill the tumour, saving healthy tissues in the process.

 

This concept is already being used for breast cancer patients where women’s tumours are analysed to decide on the best treatment method.

 

Prof Peter Johnson, the chief clinician at the charity Cancer Research UK, explained: "The idea of taking something which is particular to cancer cells and targeting them isn't hugely new, what is new is our depth of understanding.

 

"I think it is a new era of understanding and it's driven by the technology changes which have allowed us to decipher the cancer cells genetic codes at a level of detail that was unimaginable 15 or 20 years ago.

 

"So in that sense we have a fantastic range of new opportunities for treating cancers."