Personalisierte Medizin des Kopf-Hals-Karzinoms

Personalized medicine is nowadays a reality and has seen huge advances during recent years. Major factors contributing to these advances are the continuously improving bioinformatic resources and the sinking costs of sequencing. Continued rapid development, e.g., through application of artificial intelligence, can also be expected in the future. In large centers, the personalized medicine treatment reform has become firmly established in the form of corresponding centers for precision medicine, and personalized medicine approaches are regularly used by the departments dealing with cancers of various organs. The trend is moving away from tumor entity and towards molecular tumor profiling. The current situation is still far from being able to offer customized treatment for each individual tumor, be it with or without a surgical intervention, but a number of large pharma and biotechnology concerns have been working for years toward platform solutions. These platform solutions, e.g., as used to adapt the COVID vaccines, enable rapid and comparatively cost-effective modification of a tumor vaccine or an antibody, or of a cocktail of these substances for personalized treatment.