Of the new gene-targeted therapies, the one furthest along may be Xinlay from Abbott Laboratories.
The major killers--tumors of the lung, colon, prostate and pancreas-have resisted targeted therapies (see chart, p. 124).
Targeted therapies are having stunning success against a once dread disease diagnosed each year in 5, 000 patients.
Our understanding of the biology disease has expanded greatly in recent years, and the new, targeted therapies are now available.
She now says that she hopes new targeted therapies will someday allow doctors to start removing chemo from cancer treatment for some patients.
Such cancer targeted therapies, it was hoped, would pinpoint cancer's weak points and target them, resulting in greater efficacy and fewer side effects.
Until now, the biggest success story among targeted therapies has been Gleevec from Novartis (nyse: NVS - news - people ).
These so-called targeted therapies got their biggest boost from Gleevec, a Novartis drug for a rare form of leukemia, which some studies said helped 80% of patients.
The approvals would be very good news for colon cancer patients, who would add two new targeted therapies to the three main chemotherapy regimens for the disease.
For an era of targeted therapies, Private Health runs a full battery of molecular diagnostics "to sequence the entire three billion base pairs of somebody's DNA in a couple of hours, " Mr. Michelson marvels.
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Targeted therapies include trastuzumab (Herceptin) or lapatinib (Tykerb).
There is, of course, another cost to employing diagnostic tests with targeted therapies: Such tests create a situation where only people who would benefit from a drug take it--decreasing the size of the potential market.
For targeted therapies, it would be smart to include companies that make targeted diagnostics--such as Vysis , a division of Abbott Labs (nyse: ABT - news - people ) that makes a version of the Herceptin test--from the outset.
Slamon was the force behind the first in a new generation of targeted cancer therapies: Herceptin, for advanced breast cancer.
Targeted cancer therapies are all the rage in the world of big pharma, but common cancers have so many defective genes they may prove impossible to target this way.
Despite some very heated speculation about the future of targeted cancer therapies like Avastin and ImClone 's (nasdaq: IMCL - news - people ) Erbitux, there are very real concerns that biotech medicines are expensive and may not be as widely used as investors hope.
Those bad clinical results came only months after other cancer therapies that targeted single proteins also hit major roadblocks.
Thanks to the unraveling of the human genome, we are on the brink of an era of narrowly targeted, genetically geared therapies tailored to just small slices of the patient population.
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