Personalized Cancer Therapy: A Perspective

Cancer is different diseases with a common pathological feature of unlimited growth. Aim of this perspective is to update current and future individualized cancer therapy methods and results, and give new directs to improve. Present understanding and predictions of drug responses to tumor growth or metastases and anticancer drug toxicities to patients are not well-formed, but there are two ways of receiving these types of information from tumors; (i) drug sensitivity testing; (ii) the detection tumor genetic, transcription and molecular information—bioinformatics of cancer cells or patients. Individualized Cancer Therapy (ICT) has been designed to meet the requirement of selecting anticancer drugs in clinics and attracting increasing attentions in medical circle and will be irreversible trend in the future. The survival of cancer patients can be improved by many existing specific strategies of ICT, including drug sensitivity testing, cancer molecular biomarker detections, cancer biomarker-oriented therapy, anticancer drug pharmacogenetics, cancer metastasis therapy, drug combinations and cost-effective of ICT.