Personalized molecular therapy

R 626 P. Workman, The Opportunities and Challenges of Personalized Genome-Based Molecular Therapies for Cancer Targets, Technologies, and Molecular Chaperones , Cancer Chemoth. Pharm., 2003,52(Suppl. 1), S45... 

We hope that the reader will find this book a useful guide to the molecular era of cancer biology and to the implications of increasing biology knowledge of personalized cancer therapy, particularly as it applies to the field of radiation oncology. 

Dietel M, Sers C. Personalized medicine and development of targeted therapies The upcoming challenge for diagnostic molecular pathology a review. Virchows Arch 2006 448 744-755. 

This chapter sets the tone for the entire book as it delineates the molecular basis of cooperativity, a crucial biomolecular concept largely overlooked in drug design. Cooperativity is shown to be tightly related to a particular molecular attribute of target proteins known as wrapping. This structure-based feature and its exploitation in the contexts of drug safety, specificity, and personalized therapy will become the leitmotiv of the book. 

Herbst RS, Lippman SM. Molecular signatures of lung cancer—toward personalized therapy. N Engl J Med 2007 356(l) 76 8. 

Enviromics is the technology behind the measurement of environmental effects on disease diagnosis and drug therapy. This is a relatively new and undocumented area of pharmacogenomics, requiring considerable research to be carried out in the selection of environmental factors involved in personalized medicine and examining their effect on the genome, transcriptome, proteome, and metabolome in the production of molecular biomarkers. 

Large pharmaceutical companies focus on developing blockbuster drugs with sales of billions of dollars. They are not interested in developing radiopharmaceuticals for small numbers of patients in whom molecular imaging makes possible personalized, custom-tailored therapy. They believe, erroneously, that the market is too small to justify the approval costs. This is true today, but will not be in the future. 

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