Translating cancer research into personalised care

The painfully slow process of cancer drug development needs a rethink, according to a Perspective in this week’s Nature. The article, which highlights practical pointers for accelerating the process, envisages an era of effective, specific cancer medicines tailored to the individual, and a marked improvement in cancer patient care.

Most anticancer drugs are developed via a series of lengthy, expensive clinical trials involving large groups of patients with molecularly uncharacterized forms of the disease. This ‘one size fits all’ strategy is hindering the goal of effective, targeted therapeutics for molecularly defined tumours, J. S. de Bono and Alan Ashworth say.

The duo outline a series of changes they believe will expedite the development of effective cancer therapies. Drug design, they argue, requires a strong biological and genetic basis. With the aid of improved animal models, fine-tuned biological hypotheses can then be tested in more rationally designed, biomarker-driven clinical trials, and information from these can then be fed back to the lab.

There is a need to raise the bar of what is expected from clinical and translational research, and, they argue, the rapid evolution and decreasing cost of increasingly high-throughput molecular technologies should lead to a ‘personalized’ or ‘stratified’ medicine, hypothesis-testing approach.

Source: Nature