Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lvoCrxLdPno

01-02-2012 15:09 Unlike many other therapeutics, oncology drugs are not one-size-fits-all. In the movement toward personalized medicine, there's more to understand, more to test. Translational research is helping uncover how a drug will work and who it will work best in -- a crucial early step in proving the value of cancer treatments. Quintiles' translational oncology offers drug developers a better understanding of therapeutic targets, molecular signaling, drug biology and predictive biomarkers. So you can identify failures faster and prove how your drug will benefit patients. Cancer isn't one disease. It's so many different diseases, arising from any tissue in the body -- the lung, breast, prostate, even the blood. Today we are beginning to understand the molecular mechanisms of these different types of cancers. We know that there isn't just one type of breast or lung cancer. There are several subtypes, each with identifiable biomarkers. Biomarkers are bringing us a lot closer to personalized medicine. Biomarkers represent a terrific paradigm shift. But our new understanding means that developing drugs for cancer is now exponentially more complex. We're identifying both molecular targets and the drugs that work against these targets. We have to test different dose levels, different combinations of drugs, and we have to test them for both safety and effectiveness. And we have to do this for every indication where that biomarker appears. So, to attack all ...

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Molecule to Medicine: The Biomarker Frontier - Video