Personalized Medicine And Cancer Diagnosis And Medication Using Next Generation Sequencing Technologies: Prospects,Challenges And Hopes

The rapid emergence and development of new highxthroughput sequencing technologies not onlyled to precise diagnosis and medication but also have substantially reduced both the cost and thetime required to deal with cancer. Technologies called Next (Next) Generation Sequencing now aday had a great impact on what we known as personalized medicine and precise medicine. There aremany challenges to deal with cancer during routine diagnosis procedures which is summarized to,no effect with the chemotherapy or radiotherapy, no target drugs to choose, drug resistance,recurrence or metastasis, and no targeted drugs or no potent effect with the targeted drugs afterdetecting the mutation of EGFR, KRAS, ALK, BRCA1,2 etc. However, the development of cancergenome along with emergence of NGSxbased and profiling methods and subsequently improvementin our knowledge of cancer, led to the ability of comprehensive analysis of hundreds of tumorrelated genes via genetic testing, which could improve the average survival time up to 50%,accompanying with targeting therapy. On the other hand, huge amount of cancer related data anddifferent powerful bioinformatics analysis pipelines and ability to capture ctDNA from bloodcirculation system, helped us to be in a better position to deal with cancer and to advancepersonalize therapy based on the genetics of the tumor and the patient. However, there are still afew major challenges once we talk about Cancer itself. Cancer is somehow, quantitative change toqualitative change of gene mutations which can be induced by environmental degradation, stress,infection, radiation, diet and aging. It has been proved that the efficacy of cancer treatment iscorrelated with the unique nature of genetic mutations of patients. Running towards cancertreatment, targeted therapy and targeted drugs have become the hot spot recently. In this regard, acomprehensive targeted genetic testing and analysis about the relationship between the mutationsand drugs before treatment, choose the best targeted drugs according to individual patientdifferences and monitor the acquired drug resistance mutations could be a proper way towardindividualizing cancer therapy, not only for the diagnosis in early stage but also as a lost hope.