Oncology Frontier: Do the biologics work faster than the traditional chemotherapy strategies?

　　《肿瘤瞭望》：这些生物制剂比传统化疗起效快吗？

　　Dr Chan: In some of the early studies in the metastatic and neo-adjuvant setting， I think the speed of response in a particular breast cancer population being treated with a new biologic is going to depend on whether the mechanism by which that biologic works has actually been selected i.e. it is a selected population of women who have PI3 kinase mutations， for example， which then ends up being a predictor of response to a PI3 kinase inhibitor. But we are not there yet. We often need to evaluate that targeted treatment in a broader population of patients first to demonstrate the safety and efficacy and then， as a second step， try to target the groups that we think we are targeting. As a case in point， one would have thought that tumors that have PI3 kinase mutations may well be the tumors that might respond better to PI3 kinase inhibitors but there is very conflicting evidence on that already in the literature.

　　Chan博士：在一些转移癌和新辅助治疗的早期研究中，我认为特定乳腺癌患者对生物制剂的应答速度取决于生物制剂的药物作用机制，例如，PI3激酶突变是对PI3激酶抑制剂产生应答的预测因素。但事实上我们还做不到这一步。我们常常需要首先在更大范围的患者中验证药物的安全性和有效性，接下来才会锁定特定的人群。例如，大家会想当然地认为存在PI3激酶突变的患者用PI3激酶抑制剂治疗有效，但当前文献中的证据还是矛盾的。