Precision medicine approaches cancer diagnosis and treatment in a personalised way, studying the genomic and molecular characteristics of each patient’s tumour. This represents a revolution for cancer patients, as it makes it possible to offer targeted treatments with greater efficacy and lower toxicity and to assess response to treatment.
The classic model in oncology is chemotherapy, which mainly attacks the excessive and uncontrolled cell division of tumour cells, but also affects the cell division of healthy cells (hence part of its toxicity).
Targeted therapies, as their name suggests, focus only on cell types that have a mutation or a characteristic that differs from healthy cells, allowing them to be attacked selectively. They are more effective and therefore “kill” only cancer cells without affecting healthy ones, thereby minimising side effects and improving tolerability and effectiveness.
Research projects such as the VHIO’s Advanced Molecular Diagnostics Programme (DIAMAV) or the INCLIVA Precision Medicine Unit in Oncology, both funded by FERO, are an example of how we are enabling increasingly personalised cancer treatment.
The first focuses on the molecular characterisation of tumours in cancer patients, identifying key molecular alterations in the development of different tumours that may be amenable to treatment with targeted therapies.
The second focuses on technological innovation to identify and characterise new therapeutic targets in cancer patients who are candidates for experimental immunotherapy in its early stages.
Functional precision medicine, a booming field of oncology research
In an interview with Dr César Serrano, Head of the Translational Sarcoma Research Group at VHIO, when asked about the future of cancer research, he spoke about precision medicine:
“One of the major milestones will be to better predict what is going to happen to patients. Today we use genes and mutations, and this is very important because there has been an explosion of drugs, a very precise way of treating patients, but they only work for 10% of them”.
“Better understanding how different each patient’s tumours are, and also how drugs work differently for different patients, and increasingly understanding the individualisation of the patient’s biology with their environment and of the patient with drugs, is what will help us to personalise treatments in the near future”.
The doctor points out that we already have some tools for this, such as functional precision medicine, which goes one step beyond precision medicine (which offers the patient a specific drug for a specific tumour based on molecular knowledge).
“Now what we are trying to do is take a small piece of a patient’s tumour, remove it, break it down and give it different drugs until we find one that might work. And this is a field that is really booming”. Dr César Serrano, winner of the 7th FERO Fellowship, leads the VHIO Translational Sarcoma Research Group, funded by FERO through its start-up programme, dedicated to investigating many areas of biology focused on sarcomas. One of the group’s most interesting projects is a collaborative project, led by VHIO, in which patients’ evolution over time is analysed using tumour samples.
“We are sequencing these tumours at scale and, in many ways, we are integrating all these data, analysing how they evolve and looking for new ways they could be treated”. Dr César Serrano.
