Abstract

Cancer is a disease of the cell. This rather simple statement implies an enormous complexity when attempting to identify efficacious anticancer agents. One of the major issues associated with anticancer research is that traditional target-directed strategies are confronted with the essentiality of the function of the target in healthy cells. Inevitably, targeting proteins that have essential functions are likely to lead to chemical entities with narrow therapeutic windows and significant toxic effects. An additional challenge is the unstable epigenetic and genetic status of cancer cells, undergoing multiple mutations, gene copy alterations, and chromosomal abnormalities that have a direct impact on the efficacy of anticancer agents at different stages of the disease [2]. All these aspects make cancer drug discovery extremely difficult and have led to poor clinical approval success rates compared to other therapeutic areas. Therefore, individualized therapy is paramount for improving of cancer treatment. The development of rationalized and individualized therapy is reliant on the identification of the specific biomarkers, validation of the biomarkers to identify the therapeutic targets, and drug development against the identified.