Personalized cancer medicine. Biomarkers formolecular therapy stratification in pancreatic carcinoma

Ductal adenocarcinoma of the pancreas has avery poor prognosis and arising incidence. Even after curative intent resection, which is possible in aminority of patients, most patients relapse, whereas the majority is diagnosed with inoperable or metastatic disease. That's why palliative systemic chemotherapy is the current therapeutic mainstay. Biomarker-based tumor characterization could identify potential therapy targets and enable apersonalized cancer medicine. Although potentially targetable alterations occur at very low frequencies, the possible impact on patient outcome can be significant. This article summarizes some of the contributions to these aspects and gives an outlook on their clinical meaning.