Theranostics in veterinary medicine: Where are we heading?

摘要

The concept of personalized medicine has gained a lot of press in the last few years and is an area of active research in the pharmaceutical and diagnostic industries. This has been partly fuelled by the maturation of the ‘omics technologies, which have facilitated the classification and understanding of diseases at the molecular level, the identification of new therapeutic targets, and the discovery of biomarkers to predict and monitor drug response (for a review, see Semizarov and Blomme, 2008). The term ‘personalized medicine’ conveys the notion that information from the genetic makeup of patients can guide treatment decisions, and central to it is the availability of genomic diagnostic tests to select the appropriate therapeutic agents or dosing regimens to treat individual patients. These diagnostic tests have also been referred to as ‘companion diagnostics’ or ‘theranostics’ to describe their use to tailor therapy. In humans, this has already materialized in several success stories such as the immunohistochemical or fluorescence in situ hybridization-based tests to decide on initiation of Herceptin (trastuzumab) therapy in breast cancer patients.