Research and development for cancer biomarker

Abstract Cancer is a very heterogeneous group of diseases whose pathogenesis, aggressiveness, metastatic potential, and response to treatment can be different among individual patients. Personalized medicine should be practiced to take care of these cancer patients to improve medical care quality and reduce health care cost. Biomarker discovery and development are one of the cores of personalized medicine for cancer, which encompasses screening, early diagnosis, prognosis, cancer stratification, prediction of treatment efficacy and adverse reaction. Thanks to the emergence of new innovated high-throughput technologies, biomarker research and development are now efficiently performed in many laboratories and several candidates have been identified and applied to cancer patient care. To perform biomarker research and development more efficiently, we need to determine the endpoint of biomarkers clearly, to obtain a number of high-quality clinical samples with solid clinical information, and to performed high-throughput analysis in non-bias way. Once we discover biomarker candidates, we definitely need to validate their potential as biomarkers by analyzing independent sample sets with more accurate and focusing methods. Recently, pharmaceutical companies are trying to develop a drug-specific companion biomarker kits that can predict the efficacy or side effect of drugs in the early stage of development of anti-cancer drugs.