Personalised medicine heralds a new era for clinical trials for cancer drugs

摘要

OVER the Easter period, a feature article appeared in the Daily Telegraph describing the agony of a patient with non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) whose best chance of increased survival lay in being able to access a drug called crizotinib. Crizotinib is an ALK (anaplastic lymphoma kinase) inhibitor still in clinical trial that has shown remarkable efficacy in blocking the ALK activating effect of an abnormal chromosomal translocation activating the ALK gene.