Oncology Frontier: Some studies have investigated the role of micro-RNA in early diagnosis and prediction of chemosensitivity? Are there other biomarkers that are helpful in this regard?

 

　　《肿瘤瞭望》：一些研究显示，microRNA能够帮助早期诊断或预测化疗的敏感性和预测预后，请举一些例子加以说明。还有其他分子标志物吗？

 

　　Dr Kerr: This is a really important area of personalized medicine where we aim to choose the right drug for the right patient. We have developed a platform technology based on knocked-out RNA. It allows us to develop a functional assay whereby we can construct and find biomarkers so if you had bowel cancer， for example， that expresses a biomarker， then you would be much more likely to respond to the chemotherapy drug than someone who did not. We have made great progress finding biomarkers to a class of drugs called HDAC inhibitors and for the much more commonly used drugs， 5-fluorouracil and capecitabine. So there is good progress being made. We are currently validating the biomarkers in a very large prospective trial and we are waiting for the results of that before the tests will be made more generally available. It is a very hot area of science; a very useful platform technology and one that we believe we can use for many different cytotoxic drugs.

 

　　Kerr教授:这是个体化治疗的一个相当重要的领域，我们的目标是为正确的患者选择正确的药物。目前，我们已经开发出基于敲除RNA的平台技术。它使我们能够实施功能检测，据此我们可以构建并发现生物标志物，举例来说，如果你患有肠癌，表达一个生物学标志物，那么你将更可能对化疗药物起反应，而其他人可能不起作用。我们已经在寻找一类称为HDAC抑制剂药物，以及非常常用的药物5-氟尿嘧啶和卡培他滨的生物标志物上取得了很大的进展。我们目前正在一个庞大的前瞻性试验中验证生物标志物，并且正在等待该项结果，而后将把该试验全面推广。这是科学中的热门领域，一种非常有用的平台技术，并且我们相信可以用于许多不同的毒性药物。