Personalised cancer treatment
Today, cancer therapies are primarily aimed at tackling tumours with DNA abnormalities, which leaves 60 % of patients who cannot benefit from personalised treatment. The EU-funded WINTHER (WINTHERapeutics: development of a systems biology method to predict efficacy of cancer drugs to optimize individualized therapeutic decision and improve clinical outcome for cancer patients) project aimed to develop ground-breaking approaches to personalised cancer treatment, by providing a broader spectrum of cancer patients with a more targeted selection of drugs. Scientists designed a bio-computing algorithm that estimates the compatibility between a patient and a drug by integrating and analysing all available genomic information about a patient. This resulted in the design of Onco KEM®, a scalable, commercial, web-based application that uses the WINTHER algorithm to personalise chemotherapy medicine using biological data. WINTHER also pioneered a new dual biopsy procedure comparing tumour and normal tissues, to estimate which drugs could have a higher chance at targeting specific genes. While this technique was not perfected, progress was made to increase its success rate. The project has broadened the range of patients who could benefit from therapies personalised using their specific DNA and other biological factors. More specifically, the Onco KEM® market potential is estimated at 700 000 patients per year who could benefit from this technology.
Keywords
Personalised cancer treatment, WINTHER, tumours, bio-computing algorithm, Onco KEM®, cancer drugs
