next - generation precision cancer medicine and drug positioning

of smart drugs with high specificity and low toxicity in selected patients based on a precision or personalised medicine paradigm. The targeted smart drug revolution can be considered to have started in the late 1990s and early 2000s with the approval of trastuzumab (Herceptin®) for breast cancer patients with HER2 amplifications and shortly thereafter imatinib (Gleevec®) for patients with BCR-ABL1-driven chronic myeloid leukaemia (CML). These examples marked the beginning of rational drug design, which takes into account knowledge of disease pathogenetics and has lead to the concept of personalised cancer medicine. In oncology, personalised medicine entails optimisation of the entire treatment strategy for an individual patient with the help of genetic information as well as molecular and cellular analysis. The personalised tailored treatment is expected to be highly effective and better tolerated in comparison By Tea Pemovska, Päivi Östling, Caroline Heckman, Olli Kallioniemi and Krister Wennerberg