Dalton William S, Friend Stephen H
H. Lee Moffitt Cancer Center, University of South Florida, Tampa, FL 33613, USA.
Science. 2006 May 26;312(5777):1165-8. doi: 10.1126/science.1125948.
The allure of the emerging genomic technologies in cancer is their ability to generate new biomarkers that predict how individual cancer patients will respond to various treatments. However, productive implementation of cancer biomarkers into patient care will require fundamental changes in how we consider approvals for cancer indications and how we track patient responses. Here we briefly describe ongoing efforts to identify and to validate cancer biomarkers, discuss the technological hurdles that lie ahead, and then focus on the more pressing political and cultural issues that, if left unheeded, could derail many of the anticipated benefits of biomarker research.
新兴基因组技术在癌症领域的吸引力在于其能够生成新的生物标志物，这些标志物可预测个体癌症患者对各种治疗的反应。然而，要将癌症生物标志物有效地应用于患者护理，我们在考虑癌症适应症的批准方式以及跟踪患者反应的方式上需要做出根本性改变。在此，我们简要描述识别和验证癌症生物标志物的持续努力，讨论未来面临的技术障碍，然后重点关注更为紧迫的政治和文化问题，这些问题若被忽视，可能会使生物标志物研究的许多预期益处付诸东流。
