Personalised treatment
The concept of personalised treatment stems from the knowledge that not all patients with the same type of cancer respond equally to the same therapy.
Molecular diagnostics can help sub-classify cancer types and identify which patients will get the maximum benefit from specific therapies. At the same time, this reduces unnecessary treatments and side effects in patients for whom the drug will never work.
The aim of this approach is to provide anti-cancer therapies that are tailored to the individual biological characteristics of a patient’s tumour, as opposed to the traditional one-size-fits-all approach of conventional chemotherapy.
Molecular biomarkers
Recently, The Royal Marsden has helped develop new targeted drugs such as PARP inhibitors and HER2 inhibitors, and has characterised tumour-specific molecular biomarkers that identify who responds best to these therapies.
In addition we are establishing an infrastructure within the Centre for Molecular Pathology to provide patients with routine molecular diagnostics for tumour-related biomarkers, identifying those that are clinically relevant through our extensive clinical trials programme.