New Perspectives in Personalization of Therapy for Hematological Cancers

Abstract

A progress in treatment of hematological cancers was achieved. Unfortunately, some youngsters, because of rare genetic alterations that are not easy to detect, as well as heavily pretreated old patients, because of coexisting diseases that lead to changes in patient metabolism, do not respond to therapy. Moreover, sometimes familiar diversities and alterations on genetic or epigenetic level that could be transferred on diversities in metabolism or cell signaling might be a reason why patients do not respond to therapy. Interestingly, for older patients a resistance to therapy could also occur as a reason of drug cross-reactivity. For designing of effective anticancer therapy for patient with chronic lymphocytic leukemia before drug administration, patient’s leukemic cell response to anticancer drug(s) should be checked. Moreover, for patient response to treatment, also drugs prescribed previously by other medical doctors or even patients’ diet could be important for achieving therapeutic success of therapy. Therefore it is important to choose the effective drugs before their administration to patient that will improve treatment efficacy and exclude resistance to therapy. It must be stated that the special attention for personalized therapy tests should be focused on patients previously resistant to therapy, more sensitive to drugs or heavily pretreated.