Many , most probably in the scientistific community are not aware of the critical importance of Evidence Based Medicine and mainly the use of well planned Phase3 trials to medicine. These method of research is relatively recent – adopted largely only after the second world war and is the basic of most current anti tumor treatment guidelines.
While there have been incredible success stories with this methodology in cancer and especially in the treatment of stage 4 cancer our results still leave much to be desired.
On the other hand there have been great advances in our understanding of cancer and most recently the ability to study individual cancers. However obtaining clinical evidence up to the regular phase 3 generated studies for the use of personalized therapy is getting increasingly more difficult. In the meantime the patients who are doing badly need urgent help.
Through discussions of several cases I will demonstrate some of the hopes and pitfalls of current efforts to implement personalized medicine. Efforts to develop new approaches for assessing personalized treatments will also be described.
