The decisions made by patients with ovarian cancer are tough ones. They affect the entire treatment paradigm, have long-lasting ramifications, and should be made through a collaboration between patients and clinicians, according to Bradley J. Monk, MD, of the University of Arizona Cancer Center, Phoenix, Arizona, and Paula J. Anastasia, RN, MS, AOCN®, of Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angel...

BACKGROUND Gastrointestinal cancers are among the leading causes of cancer-related deaths worldwide. In different tumor types, personalized systemic treatment strategies based upon biomarker-selection were established over the last years. Although there is a flood of targeted agents in clinical development, only a few targeted agents with a predictive biomarker could be established for the trea...

There is an increasing emphasis across the fields of medicine on managing individual patients in ways that are tailored to the patient’s unique characteristics—an approach termed personalized or individualized medicine. Although these terms are relatively new, the concept of personalized medicine has a long history, with Sir William Osler (1849– 1919) famously quoted as saying that “the good ph...

Medical diagnostics and treatment has advanced from a one size fits all science to treatment of the patient as a unique individual. Currently, this is limited solely to genetic analysis. However, epigenetic, transcriptional, proteomic, posttranslational modifications, metabolic, and environmental factors influence a patient's response to disease and treatment. As more analytical and diagnostic ...

While advanced melanoma remains one of the most challenging cancers, recent developments in our understanding of the molecular drivers of this disease have uncovered exciting opportunities to guide personalized therapeutic decisions. Genetic analyses of melanoma have uncovered several key molecular pathways that are involved in disease onset and progression, as well as prognosis. These advances...

Glioblastoma multiforme (GBM) is the most common primary malignant brain tumor in adults. Patients with GBM have poor outcomes, even with the current gold-standard first-line treatment: maximal safe resection combined with radiotherapy and temozolomide chemotherapy. Accumulating evidence suggests that advances in antigen-specific cancer vaccines and immune checkpoint blockade in other advanced ...

Somatostatin receptor positron emission tomography/computed tomography using 68Ga-labeled somatostatin analogs is the mainstay for the evaluation of receptor status in neuroendocrine tumors (NETs). This translates towards better therapy options, with increasing evidence of peptide receptor radionuclide therapy (PRRT) as the treatment of choice for advanced or progressive NETs. There are benefit...