At the 2009 American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) breast cancer symposium, in San Francisco, the Keynote Address (by Martine PIccart-Gebhart of the Jules Bordet Institute) was very relevant to Individualized Tumor Response Testing.
The speaker made the point that only 8% of new drugs entering Phase I trials ever make it to marketing and that this percentage is even lower for cancer drugs, because current drug testing is inefficient, with many drugs failing late in development, with these expensive failures owing, in large measure, to ineffective drugs and poor patient selection (i.e, lack of prognostic and predictive markers for response to therapy).
The speaker went on to note that little progress has been made in identifying which therapeutic strategies are likely to be effective for individual patients. The speaker concluded that identifying markers that can predict response to a particular drug remains a great challenge.
Why was nothing being presented at this meeting which reports any progress at all in drug selection through the use of molecular profiling? When microarrays and high throughput RT-PCR emerged some years back, you'd think that there would be quite a bit of progress by now. Sad to say, there has not.
http://theoncologist.alphamedpress.o.../full/12/3/301
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