A New Model of Cancer Care
March 23, 2009
The past several decades have seen remarkable strides in the scientific understanding of cancer. Nobel prizes have been awarded for the discovery of cellular mechanisms that go awry in cancer cells. More recently, with the advent of highly sophisticated molecular diagnostic tools, including high-throughput genomic technologies, there is growing recognition that cancers can differ dramatically at the molecular level of genes and proteins—even if they are lumped together as the "same type" of cancer by traditional diagnostic pathology. Similarly, individual tumors classified as different—lung versus colon, for example—may turn out to share pathways and characteristics at the molecular level and may even respond in similar ways to drugs that target those common mechanisms. These advances in knowledge have led to what many believe is the coming revolution in cancer treatment: personalized oncology, based on a new generation of molecular diagnostics and targeted therapy.
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