"Targeting" treatment directly to the tumor cells, sparing healthy cells the worst of chemotherapy's damage. A push in oncology toward protecting patients against drugs and treatments, although successful for some patients, won't work for most others.
Oncologists prescribe patients one standard empiric chemotherapy regimen after another, until they find one that works. This often can expose patients to the side effects of chemotherapy, without showing any cancer-killing results. Guesswork can be done in a laboratory instead.
The tactic of using biopsied cells to predict which cancer treatments will work best for the patient, by taking pieces of tumor tissue, apply different chemotherapy treatments to it and examine the results to see which drug or combination of drugs do the best job killing the tumor cells.
Older technology assay-tests failed because scientists looked to see which drugs inhibited the cancer cells' growth (cell-growth), not which chemotherapies actively killed the tumor cells (cell-death). Cancer wasn't growing faster than other cells, it's just dying slower. The newer assay-test technology connects drugs to patients by what "kills" their cells, not by what "slows" them down.
Researchers tested how well women with relapsed ovarian cancer would respond to a combination of a pancreatic cancer drug and an ovarian cancer drug. They found the combination worked on a number of women, and testing cells in petri dishes predicted which women would respond to this combination and which wouldn't. A metastatic pancreatic cancer patient can be treated successfully with a combination of drugs commonly used to fight lung, pancreatic, breast and colorectal cancers.
The problem with standard empiric chemotherapy is that it's like taking a machine gun and shooting everything in the way and hoping you get the cancer cells along with that. If you "target" the therapy, meaning you're only treating patients who will benefit from the treatments, you'll eliminate patients from having undue chemotherapy side-effects without any benefit."target" treatment directly to the tumor cells, sparing healthy cells the worst of chemotherapy's damage.
There is Whole Cell Profiling that shows data indicating a near doubling in the survival of patients with platinum-resistant ovarian cancer, striking correlations between platinum activity and patient survival in previously-untreated ovarian cancer, and a comprehensive meta-analysis of scores of studies reporting response and survival correlations in thousands of patients.
With relapsed, platinum-resistant ovarian cancer, every clinical trial in history has just shown a 10-12 month median survival in this setting. However, background data (680 fresh surgical specimens) for the design of a cliinical trial to determine the efficacy of CCDRT-directed therapy of platinum-resistant ovarian cancer, submitted to the 2003 Society of Gynecologic Oncology meeting, had a 27 month median survival and a fair number of long-term survivors (2004-AB-171-SGO). All specimens were tested with two separate Medicare-approved CCDRT assays (DISC and MTT) having cell-death endpoints.
http://weisenthal.org/w_sgo_abs.pdf