Personalized Medicine

Our Unique Concept of Personalized Medicine in Cancer

The notion of personalized medicine in anti-cancer intervention is becoming an area of high priority in front-line medical oncology and drug development. The high risk of failure in pivotal trials conducted in an unselected manner (i.e. patient’s selection based on histologically-based tumor types) and the marginal benefits derived from a number of statistically significant positive trials reinforce this approach.

The identification of predictive signatures of sensitivity/resistance to given anticancer drugs is one of the most relevant approaches in medical oncology.

In this context, the clinical practice is faced with the challenge of incorporating practical & feasible gene signatures that can lead to relevant information to guide the best therapeutic decisions and to maximize the potential of treatment-related clinical benefit.

In contrast with large-scale signatures derived from wide gene screening studies, our view is that more rational and simplistic predictive models are going to be a determinant and of a higher impact in the real clinical practice.

Our strategy in the discovery of predictive signatures is based on an in-depth analysis of the molecular pharmacodynamics (i.e. impact of a given therapy in relevant biological pathways) of the “case” to select the elements (gene expression, protein expression..) of a putative signature for further analysis.

Such a potential signature is therefore tested in tumor samples from patients already treated with the “case” drug/therapy, thus saving significant time and investment to generate evidence to run prospective validation studies.

This unique approach has already generated solid predictive signatures in the field of lung cancer, breast cancer and bladder cancer.