Novel Strategies on Personalized Medicine for Breast Cancer Treatment: An Update

Abstract

Breast cancer is the most common cancer type among women worldwide. With breast cancer patients and survivors being reported to experience a repertoire of symptoms that are detrimental to their quality of life, the development of breast cancer treatment strategies that are effective with minimal side effects is therefore required. Personalized medicine, the treatment process that is tailored to the individual needs of each patient, is recently gaining increasing attention for its prospect in the development of effective cancer treatment regimens. Indeed, recent studies have identified a number of genes and molecules that may be used as biomarkers for predicting drug response and severity of common cancer-associated symptoms. These would provide useful clues not only for the determination of the optimal drug choice/dosage to be used in personalized treatment, but also for the identification of gene or molecular targets for the development of novel symptom management strategies, which ultimately would lead to the development of more personalized therapies for effective cancer treatment. In this article, recent studies that would provide potential new options for personalized therapies for breast cancer patients and survivors are reviewed. We suggest novel strategies, including the optimization of drug choice/dosage and the identification of genetic changes that are associated with cancer symptom occurrence and severity, which may help in enhancing the effectiveness and acceptability of the currently available cancer therapies.

The Effects of Pharmacological and Non-Pharmacological Interventions on Symptom Management and Quality of Life among Breast Cancer Survivors Undergoing Adjuvant Endocrine Therapy: A Systematic Review

“…Breast cancer patients, who have completed primary treatments such as surgery, chemotherapy and radiotherapy, require additional therapies for preventing recurrence of the disease. Adjuvant endocrine therapies, which encompass hormonal or endocrine therapy using drugs such as tamoxifen and aromatase inhibitors (AI), are known to serve this purpose [1][2][3][4][5]. These drugs are prescribed to breast cancer patients after the completion of primary treatment, which need to be taken daily for a duration of five years for the therapy to be effective [6].…”

Naturally Derived Formulations and Prospects towards Cancer

“…In the future, each patient should have their own unique chemotherapy protocol, which improves the therapeutic quality by selecting and prescribing Health well-matched drugs and avoiding ineffective ones [58] [164]. Applying such individualized chemotherapeutics through a personalized chemotherapy regime will further improve the final outcome [18] [165]. This will be accompanied by the identification and testing of novel, more specific and selective drugs either via synthetic routes or by purifying from herbal sources [166].…”

Towards Privacy-preserving Authenticated Disease Risk Queries

“…However, although the cost of clinical diagnosis is same for both treatments, the cost of personalized medicine rises because of considering a patient's genomic profile [45]. Recently a number of approaches [10], [12] have been introduced for personalized medicine that can handle a large number of diseases like breast cancer and clinical depression. In Ref.…”