The scientific and technological breakthroughs that emanated from the discovery of the human genome are transforming medicine at an unprecedented pace. Since the unveiling of the Human Genome Project less than 15 years ago, we have been witnessing not less than an extraordinary revolution in the way in which medicine is perceived. This ‘new age’ medicine is palpable both from the patient and practitioner’s standpoints. While tailoring of treatments for individual patients has been attempted for centuries, we, as scientists and clinicians, currently have powerful tools that can help us deliver the optimal treatment for each individual patient on the basis of his or her genetic makeup or proteomic representation.
While Personalized Medicine is still in its infancy, it is evident that the concept of ‘personalizing’ the clinics holds the promise of providing avenues for disease therapy in the future. The advent of genomic, proteomic and additional high throughput platforms, followed by their steady improvement and refinement in recent years, provides not only the technological stage for this new era, but also generates conceptual, medical, ethical and even economic dilemmas of both scientific and clinical relevance.
The purpose of this Research Topic is to provide a comprehensive, yet focused, overview on the trends, avenues, achievements and challenges lying ahead in the area of Personalized Medicine in Cancer Research. This Topic will deal with novel state-of-the-art technologies and their applications in cancer diagnostics and therapeutics. Both basic as well as translational topics will we presented, and their potential impact on Personalized and Precision Medicine will be analyzed.
The scientific and technological breakthroughs that emanated from the discovery of the human genome are transforming medicine at an unprecedented pace. Since the unveiling of the Human Genome Project less than 15 years ago, we have been witnessing not less than an extraordinary revolution in the way in which medicine is perceived. This ‘new age’ medicine is palpable both from the patient and practitioner’s standpoints. While tailoring of treatments for individual patients has been attempted for centuries, we, as scientists and clinicians, currently have powerful tools that can help us deliver the optimal treatment for each individual patient on the basis of his or her genetic makeup or proteomic representation.
While Personalized Medicine is still in its infancy, it is evident that the concept of ‘personalizing’ the clinics holds the promise of providing avenues for disease therapy in the future. The advent of genomic, proteomic and additional high throughput platforms, followed by their steady improvement and refinement in recent years, provides not only the technological stage for this new era, but also generates conceptual, medical, ethical and even economic dilemmas of both scientific and clinical relevance.
The purpose of this Research Topic is to provide a comprehensive, yet focused, overview on the trends, avenues, achievements and challenges lying ahead in the area of Personalized Medicine in Cancer Research. This Topic will deal with novel state-of-the-art technologies and their applications in cancer diagnostics and therapeutics. Both basic as well as translational topics will we presented, and their potential impact on Personalized and Precision Medicine will be analyzed.