Abstract
Therapies for patients with cancer have changed gradually over the past decade, moving away from the administration of broadly acting cytotoxic drugs towards the use of more-specific therapies that are targeted to each tumour. To facilitate this shift, tests need to be developed to identify those individuals who require therapy and those who are most likely to benefit from certain therapies. In particular, tests that predict the clinical outcome for patients on the basis of the genes expressed by their tumours are likely to increasingly affect patient management, heralding a new era of personalized medicine.
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Acknowledgements
We thank L. Wessels and P. Borst for discussions. Our work was supported by grants from the Centre for Biomedical Genetics, the Cancer Genomics Centre and the Dutch Cancer Society.
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L.J.v.V. and R.B. are employees of, and hold shares in, Agendia. Agendia markets MammaPrint, which is discussed in this review article.
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Correspondence should be addressed to R.B. (r.bernards@nki.nl).
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van 't Veer, L., Bernards, R. Enabling personalized cancer medicine through analysis of gene-expression patterns. Nature 452, 564–570 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature06915
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nature06915
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