ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews the major breakthroughs in personalized oncology in the most prevalent cancers in the United States: lung cancer, breast cancer, colon cancer, melanoma, prostate cancer, brain cancers, and blood cancers. The challenges for targeted therapy in cancer are that cancers are heterogenous and difficult to biopsy, and old histological classifications have become outdated in the face of molecular data. Targeted therapy in oncology is based on driver mutations: identification of driver mutations for each cancer is crucial for the development of personalized therapy and molecular tests for diagnosis, monitoring, and management of cancer. Gene and chromosome abnormalities observed in cancer include gene mutations, chromosome structural abnormalities, and chromosome number abnormalities. The tissue-based analysis is mostly done by predictive molecular pathology applying conventional or high-throughput techniques on FFPE tissue. This is the basis of personalized, individualized or precision medicine.
