Contact our Head of Personalized Oncology Services.

How can CollabRx ONE help personalize my therapy?

Cancer is a very heterogenous disease – within each cancer type (say, stage IV lung cancer) there may be between 20 and 200 different “diseases” (called subtypes) that all appear pathologically identical. Each individual's cancer has its own molecular profile, which can lead to differing responses to treatment. For example, two patients who may have the same type of cancer might have only a handful of mutations in common out of hundreds that may drive the cancer. The goal of personalized medicine is to identify the most effective therapies for an individual patient based on their genetic profile.

Targeted therapies, such as Herceptin and Tarceva, are at the forefront of the personalized medicine revolution. These drugs interfere with specific molecules involved in tumor growth and progression, such as cell signaling and angiogenesis. For example, Herceptin inhibits a receptor protein called HER2 that is overexpressed in ~25% of breast cancer patients and is fairly effective in this group of patients. Tarceva is an inhibitor of the epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) pathway and is used in a variety of cancers that overexpress EGFR. However, cancers that harbor mutations in the k-RAS gene are unresponsive to Tarceva even when they overexpress EGFR. Thus, treatment with Herceptin and Tarceva are personalized to cancer patients depending on their status of HER2, and EGFR and k-RAS respectively.

In reality, drug responsiveness of individual tumors will depend on several molecular aberrations including but not limited to EGFR and k-RAS. The ultimate goal of personalized medicine is to integrate information about all relevant genes and proteins to suggest treatment options that are most likely to succeed for each individual.

Please contact us to learn more about CollabRx ONE personalized research services.