Katerina Perets
Freelance journalist

“Katerina obtained her PhD in Molecular Biology from the Freie University and is currently an Assistant Editor for Wiley in Berlin, Germany”

Abstract

The manner in which cancer survives, spreads and becomes resistant to therapy depends on the patient’s individual genetic background and environmental factors. Thus, the same type of tumor behaves differently in each individual patient and has a variable response to the same therapies. For this reason, the search for the ultimate cancer cure gave way to the era of personalized cancer treatment and a wave of novel cancer treatments has flooded the market. These include targeted therapy, immunotherapy which enlists the patient’s own immune system to fight the tumor and genome-editing.

Cancer is a general name for over 100 diseases characterized by rapid growth of cells to form tumors and eventually spread to nearby organs. Cancer progresses by evading the body’s immune system and grows its own blood supply network to feed the tumor using the body’s nutrients (1).
Provided that cancer hasn’t spread to other parts of the body, surgery can be an effective treatment, but for metastatic cancer, chemotherapy and radiation must be employed (2,3).
These treatments, however, offer poor selectivity between cancer and healthy cells resulting in severe side effects. Moreover, most patients eventually develop chemotherapy resistance and the cancer progresses (4).

The manner in which cancer survives, spreads and becomes resistant to therapy depends on the patient’s individual genetic background and environmental factors. Thus, the same type of tumor behaves differently in each individual patient and has a variable response to the same therapies. For this reason, the search for the ultimate cancer cure gave way to the era of personalized cancer treatment and a wave of novel cancer treatments has flooded the market. 

These include tar ...