Paving the Way for Personalized Medicine in Cancer: Experience in Iran

The vision of matching the right patient to the right treatment at the right time has always been the main goal of cancer therapy particularly in cancer therapy. For instance, the drug Gleevec (imatinib)that can stop the effect of the new fusion products produced by Philadelphia translocation in patients with leukemia. Similarly, it turns out that Erbitux (cetuximab) improves the survival of people with colorectal cancer whose tumour cells carry a mutated EGFR gene but not a mutated KRAS gene. However, until recently, very few cancer patients enjoyed the benefits of truly (personalized) / precision therapy. With the exploding knowledge of tumor genotype, as well as increasingly available targeted treatment options, it seems that the era of precision cancer medicine is nigh. The story of cancer therapy in Iran is more or less similar to the rest of the world. Every day, thousands of people are taking medications that will not help them. The very expensive drug, Herceptin, that supposed to do target therapy in breast cancer woman with Her2 gene amplification, could only help the survival of about 50% of patients. In addition, the toxic side effects of anticancer drugs can be a major limitation to their effective use. Moreover, the effectiveness of chemotherapy is limited by drug resistance. This is a major obstacle in cancer chemotherapy in Iranian cancer patients. Knowing that genotypic differences, with consequent phenotypic expression could be one of the main resean of differences in response to therapy. Also, it is important to note that targeted therapies should ideally be accompanied by a diagnostic marker, we aimed to investigate possible genetic biomarkers which could lead to better diagnosis, prognosis and prediction to response to chemothepy in Iranian patients with colorectal cancer and breast cancer which in this talk I will present some of the data.

کلیدواژه ها:

Personalized Medicine ، Cancer 17 17