4 Ways Precision Medicine Impacts Cancer Treatment

Greater workloads

Personalized medicine is making therapy more targeted, but also more confusing for healthcare stakeholders.

“A dramatic expansion in all the biomarker testing that now must be done in oncology adds operational workload for health systems, along with additional expense,” Schafer says.

Genetics, not organs

Precision medicine is increasingly leading to oncolytics being directed at a genetic marker for a disease rather than to the organ of cancer origin.

“The best example of this is the approval of a checkpoint inhibitor for microsatellite instability-high (MSI-H) cancer,” says Schafer. “The approval allows the therapy to be used for a variety of cancers as long as the cancer cells are characteristic of MSI-H.”

Fragmentation

Personalized medicine is fragmenting the treatment of cancer.

Diseases like non–small cell lung cancer, which once was addressed with chemotherapy in most cases, now may be treated by one or more of a variety of agents depending on the biomarker test results, according to Schafer. “Treatment algorithms that once could be represented by the straight trunk of a tree are now more akin to the many branches on top,” he says.

More investigation

Personalized medicine is driving the investigation of more combination regimens.

“Researchers now have access to therapies that attack different biomarkers of a cancer, promoting the concept that attacking multiple targets at once may lead to better results. While efficacy may be enhanced, safety may be an issue and costs rise,” Schafer says.