In the news

The explosion of information in the emerging field of personalized medicine and pharmacogenomics presents both an amazing opportunity for advancement in understanding of treatments for cancer and the challenge of organizing that information. Read some of the latest articles in the news.

The Science

We live in an exciting age of scientific advancement that has led to new capabilities in battling cancer. The advent of advanced molecular analytical tools provide a growing understanding of how a person’s cancer differs dramatically at the molecular level of genes and proteins — even if the cancer is defined by traditional cancer-type classifications.

Similarly, individual tumors classified as different — pancreatic versus colon, for example — may often share common molecular characteristics and may even respond in similar ways to drugs that target those common mechanisms. These advances are leading to a revolutionary approach where cancer treatment focuses on unique molecular cancer attributes and selects targeted therapies with the greatest potential for impacting the disease.

Because science now understands the over 20,000 genes found in a patient’s cancer, we can interrogate the disease at the most fundamental level, identifying the key molecular defects that are fueling a person’s cancer. The next logical step then is to identify drugs targeting those key molecular defects to stop the survival, growth, or metastasis of a person’s cancer. Identifying the right drug targeting the specific disease at the right time is the promise of personalized medicine.

About Targeted Drugs

Just as each person is genetically unique, each person’s cancer has its own molecular profile that defines how it grows, how it progresses, and how it responds to various treatments.

Since work began on mapping the human genome in the 1990s, there has been a dramatic shift in development away from traditional "non-targeted" chemotherapy drugs (which attack proliferating cells and can be toxic) and toward “targeted” drugs. Targeted drugs focus on specific molecular alterations that can be identified within cancer cells regardless of the cancer’s anatomical location.

Currently, more than 68% of oncology compounds in US clinical trials are molecularly targeted. Throughout the pharmaceutical universe there are more than 1,200 molecularly developed drugs targeting more than 300 molecular attributes.