Each cancer has a different blueprint. No two patients are alike.
When an oncologist has hundred cancer patients, he finds himself with hundred totally different cancer diseases to treat. One of the most striking things about cancer is how it progresses differently in each patient and how each patient responds differently to current therapeutic interventions. Our way of thinking about cancer has to shift dramatically when we want to unlock the secret code of cancer’s complex, multigenic nature, of its huge diversity, when we want to discover the deeper mysteries of cancer cells. Of every cell.

We used to think that cancer is a well-defined enemy, it turns out that all cancer cells aren’t created equal-They are deadly traitors. Good cells turned into bad ones. Turned into an army of enemies, using a diversity of tricks to thrive and spread. It’s an army of tough human life destroying fighters relying on a rich arsenal of genetic variation, brought about by the tandem forces of bewildering genomic instability and evolutionary selection.

Delving into cell diversity, detecting differences in the individual cells is more than a challenge on its own. Discovering multiple treatments required to what appears outwardly as a single type of cancer but in reality consists of a varying combination of genes turned on and off –in still unknown ways- that help the cancer develop and spread, requires…NEW THINKING.

Why wonder about poor therapeutic outcomes and serious side effects, when patients get standard “trial and failure” therapy? Isn’t it more than time to take the therapy to the particular genetics of a patient’s cancer?

Knowledge is humanity’s strongest weapon. Medicine’s goal has to be to find out how an individual’s genetic makeup controls the ways a person responds to a particular therapy and to use that knowledge to determine a drug’s potential for each patient. We need new modes of action. We need for things to work.