Therapeutic Application of Pharmacogenomics in Oncology

Abstract

Personalizing cancer treatment has been proved to be difficult for healthcare providers due to the nature of chemotherapies which includes narrow therapeutic indices, severe and potential life-threatening toxicities, and variable response rates and efficacies. Studies in pharmacogenomics (PGx) may help guide clinicians to personalize treatment for cancer patients. Implementing PGx in cancer treatment may offer choices to anticipate differences in drug response, resistance, efficacy, and toxicity within chemotherapeutic agents and targeted immune biologic agents. This can be used to achieve optimization of treatment regimens based on patients' variability. Many of the cancer treatment agents are biologics targeting specific antigens expressed on cancer cells, or blocking stimulators and signal transduction pathways of tumor growth, or enhance anticancer immune responses. It is now crucial for clinicians to understand the important association of clinically important biomarker polymorphisms with the clinical benefits of cancer therapies. By identifying specific PGx biomarker polymorphisms present in cancer cells, physicians can select and tailor a patient's treatment based on his or her genetic profile. PGx-guided cancer treatment may have the ability to improve the survival of patients while avoiding the unnecessary cost due to unresponsive treatment and toxicities of that patients experience.

Keywords: efficacy; oncology; pharmacogenomics; resistance; toxicity.