Interview with John Heymach, MD, PhD
Associate Professor, MD
Anderson Cancer Center,
Houston, Texas, USA
01.12.2010
Well, for cancer doctors, like myself, and I think cancer
researchers around the world, we see personalised cancer care as
the future of cancer therapy. What personalised cancer care means
is using the right drug for the right person at the right time. And
let me explain that in a little more detail. If you take lung
cancer as an example, we started using chemotherapy for lung cancer
in the early 70s; 1973 was the first time we started using two
chemotherapy drugs together for lung cancer. Between 1973 and 2000,
there was almost no improvement despite trying all these different
chemotherapy drugs.
How to personalise cancer care is one of the most active areas of
research; and that's what we spend a lot of our time trying to
develop is what we call biomarkers for selecting patients for
personalised care. In recent years, we've learnt that certain lung
cancer patients have a mutation in a protein, called the EGF
receptor or EGFR. And patients, whose cancers have an EGFR
mutation, are very responsive to drugs that block the EGFR pathway,
and so, fortunately a number of these
have been developed in recent years. So, if you have an EGFR
mutation, you've got about a 70 or 80% chance of having a dramatic
shrinkage.
Developing targeted therapies and understanding how to combine
them really is the future of cancer, the golden egg, so to speak.
If we could look into the future, I think what all of us can
envision is that a tumour would get profiled, we would understand
it at a molecular level, where we're not treating all lung cancer
the same, for example, we're treating tumour a differently than
tumour b than tumour c. And then coming up with a non-toxic or a
cocktail with as little toxicity as possible that people are able
to take for a prolonged period of time.