Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts, USA.
Nat Med. 2017 Sep 8;23(9):1028-1035. doi: 10.1038/nm.4389.
The essential job of precision medicine is to match the right drugs to the right patients. In cancer, precision medicine has been nearly synonymous with genomics. However, sobering recent studies have generally shown that most patients with cancer who receive genomic testing do not benefit from a genomic precision medicine strategy. Although some call the entire project of precision cancer medicine into question, I suggest instead that the tools employed must be broadened. Instead of relying exclusively on big data measurements of initial conditions, we should also acquire highly actionable functional information by perturbing-for example, with cancer therapies-viable primary tumor cells from patients with cancer.
精准医学的基本任务是将合适的药物与合适的患者相匹配。在癌症领域，精准医学几乎等同于基因组学。然而，最近令人警醒的研究表明，大多数接受基因组检测的癌症患者并未从基因组精准医学策略中获益。尽管有人对整个癌症精准医学项目提出质疑，但我建议，所采用的工具必须得到扩展。我们不应仅仅依赖于初始条件的大数据测量，还应该通过对来自癌症患者的可行原发性肿瘤细胞进行干扰（例如采用癌症疗法）来获取更具操作性的功能信息。
