Biomarkers and Target Therapy for Lung Cancer

Abstract

Precision (target) medicine is proposed as a new strategy to identify and develop new highly selective drugs against specific targets for the disease and more precise tailoring of medicines to the target populations of patients. Precision medicine can be an important approach to create more novel and safer therapeutics (tyrosine kinase inhibitors, tumour specific monoclonal antibodies) for patients with gene mutation, aberrations, or protein over-expression. Precision medicine requires an understanding mutational processes, and heterogeneity between cancer cells during tumor evolution. The present review briefly define various heterogeneities and potential associations with drug efficacy and resistance, emphasize the importance to develop functional biomarkers to monitor drug efficacy and resistance, and define opportunities and challenges of precision medicine for clinical practice.