Sciclips
Cancer biomarkers can be used for developing assays for clinical diagnosis, identifying patient’s response to a particular drug, optimizing personalized drug treatment regimen (drug dose, drug treatment schedule etc.), monitoring the efficacy of treatment (disease stage, tumor progression, tumor recurrence etc.) and in cancer theranostics. With the growing trend towards the advancement of personalized medicine concept, companion diagnostic tools may play a significant role in patient stratification by identifying patients with positive clinical response to an existing or novel treatment method. However, current limitations in identifying life-threatening side effects of therapeutic drugs may have negative impact on developing efficient drug therapy strategies, often difficult to identify short or long term side effects of drugs during clinical trials. Therefore, there is a need for developing predictive methods and assays for identifying secondary disease causing side effects of drugs. We propose disease specific diagnostic biomarkers as an attractive tool for predicting the occurrence of secondary diseases from a specific drug treatment method. In this blog, we tried to explore the potential of cancer diagnostic biomarkers for predicting therapeutic drug (non anti-cancer drugs) induced cancer occurrence in patients. For identifying biomolecules that might be potentially associated with pioglitazone induced bladder cancer development in patients, hypothesis driven functional integration and identification of biomolecules, incorporating traditional pathway analysis, linked to bladder cancer specific diagnostic biomarkers and drug target (PPARgamma) were adopted. Please visit the blog section in sciclips.com for reading the full article.