mick试验—肿瘤个体化医疗.docVIP

MiCK Assay?Chemotherapy of a malignant tumor aims to either completely eliminate the tumor cells or substantially reduce their number. Chemotherapeutic agents’ ability to kill tumor cells makes this goal achievable. The tumor cells of an individual patient, however, may be sensitive to one chemotherapeutic agent but not to another. Oncologists currently use an empirical approach to the selection of treatment protocols – the selection of a therapeutic agent is based on statistical data obtained in large clinical studies. MICK试验 恶性肿瘤化疗的目的在于完全消灭肿瘤细胞或大大减少它们的数量。化疗药物的作用是杀死肿瘤细胞来达到这个目的。但是个体病人的肿瘤细胞可能对一种化疗药物敏感而对另一种就不敏感。目前肿瘤学家利用经验来选择治疗方案——即以大量临床研究中获得的统计数据为基础来选择化疗药物。?For instance, a clinical study shows that agent A helps 60 leukemia patients out of 100 to keep their disease in check, or, as it is usually said, to achieve complete remission. With agent B, complete remission is seen in 35 patients while with agent C complete remission is achieved in 5 patients. Thus, oncologists selecting between agent A, agent B, and agent C, would rather use agent A because agent A is expected to be effective in 60% of leukemia patients. What about the remaining 40% of patients who are statistically not expected to respond to agent A, but would better benefit from agent B or agent C? For them, the use of agent A will result in treatment failure. In other words, their tumor cells will not be killed effectively enough, complete remission will not be achieved and the disease will progress. It may be reasonable for patients in this group to utilize agent B or agent C after agent A fails. Unfortunately, it is not always possible to use another treatment protocol with the same patient. First, all chemotherapeutic agents are highly toxic substances and patients may not survive another round of treatment. Besides, time is lost and the disease may progress beyond its treatable phase. To complicate the picture, it is unclear whether the patient’s tumor cells would be more sensitive to agent