Zeitschrift für Gesundheitsfürsorge und Prävention

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Precision Medicine in Cancer ? A Pathology Perspective

Muhammad Usman Shams

Precision medicine is an emerging field in medicine for disease prevention and treatment that takes into account biological characteristics of an individual patient to allow delivery of more individualized medical care. In the case of cancer, such biological characteristics are based largely on analysis of tumor tissue. With the advent of modern techniques like immunohistochemistry & gene sequencing and the enhanced understanding of the tumor immune microenvironment, the modern pathology labs are able to derive more and more biologically useful information from biospecimens. This information has not only allowed sub-classification of cancers for better therapeutic and prognostic knowledge, but also has provided unprecedented possibilities to study the biology of pre-malignancy. Journey of modern pathology towards precision medicine in cancer is expected to provide unique opportunities for the dissemination and implementation of public health interventions.