Precision oncology (or
precision cancer medicine) can be considered a chapter of
personalized medicine. The aim of precision oncology would actually be to tailor patient handling and treatment at a precision that goes beyond the few pharmacogenomic correlations known to date. The existing knowledge on the genetic associations of cancer drugs and biomarker
s is still very limited. Only few mutations in few genes (
pharmacogenomic markers) have been confirmed to always give resistance or sensitivity to a certain drug. However, according to several authors, there is a huge (and unfortunately disorganized) amount of data regarding patient treatments and tumor genetic variants which could be analyzed and possibly decoded into complex interaction principles to help personalized medicine to become even more powerful. This would mean identifying additional
common driver mutations,
rarer driver mutations,
epigenetic and environmental factor and characterizing
cancer mutations activity on different germline substrata.
Some (big) efforts along the way to build the knowledge foundation necessary to develop precision oncology have been already initiated. See for instance the open-access knowledge base for precision medicine
PMC Wiki and Knowledgebase (PMID:
25563458). Both public and private organizations have started to build their own databases and some of their projects are also going beyond genetics, involving the collection of many additional biochemical and clinical data (see for instance Flatiron Health).
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