Adapting to change and seeing the opportunities in breast cancer management

摘要

The management of breast cancer has entered a new era: personalized medicine; but what does that mean, both for the patient, and the medical practitioner? Doctors will no longer treat patients with surgery, radiation and drug therapy with the expectation of treatment success for only a proportion of patients in their care - one size will no longer fit all. That is the good news; however, the treatment approach for each individual patient and their cancer will ultimately be different. Some 40 years ago, there were no practical tests available capable of determining the effectiveness and outcome of cancer therapy. This contrasts dramatically with the early days of the antibiotic revolution in the 1940s and 1950s when the appropriate antibiotic could be identified rapidly in the laboratory, targeting the infection affecting an individual patient. It was personalized medicine and it worked. Increasingly in the future, a new spectrum of diagnostic tests will identify which cancers express a series of targets, and tumors will be treated individually based on the targets they express; both should dramatically enhance the chances of a successful outcome for the patient. The launch of this new journal Breast Cancer Management is, therefore, timely. The aim of this new journal is to provide clarity for the medical practitioner in an age when the publicity pendulum swings dramatically from 'triumphant breakthrough' to 'drug approval withdrawn by the US FDA'.