Personalized medicine: present and future of breast cancer management

Abstract

Breast cancer is the first cause of cancer in women worldwide. Recent molecular analyses have shown that it is not a single disease but a mixture of several diseases with different biological behaviors, which should lead to treatment customization for each patient. Personalized medicine is based on tumor and/or patient molecular profiles. This new way to think oncology is currently applied at different stages of breast cancer management, including prognosis, prediction of treatment efficacy, and development of new therapies via new kinds of clinical trials. These trials are not only based on tumor site but also on tumor genetic characterization using genomic tools such as gene expression profiling, array-CGH or next-generation sequencing technologies. The aim of personalized medicine is to tailor treatment according to the specificities of a single disease in a given patient. In this review, we present the advances in treatment personalization which are currently used in daily practice as well as the technologies and therapies under investigation in various clinical trials.

Keywords: Breast cancer; Molecular profiling; Personalized medicine.