The new mantra for delivering optimal cancer treatment is "personalized care." This extends beyond the holistic to using germline and somatic tumoral mutations to link a specific therapy to some prognostic or predictive factor which defines a particularly responsive patient subgroup who might benefit most from treatment. Furthermore, inherited polymorphisms have the potential to greatly modulate the side effects of treatment, especially for chemotherapy which has a notoriously narrow therapeutic window.
Journal article
Discov med
10/2009
8
104 - 107
Antineoplastic Agents, Biomarkers, Tumor, Colorectal Neoplasms, Genome-Wide Association Study, Genomic Instability, Humans, Pharmacogenetics, Precision Medicine