From cancer researcher to opinion leadership and advocacy in translational medicine

As a researcher and advocate of individualized treatment, after decades of stagnation in the development of effective approaches to cancer treatment my role and goal is to discover novel molecular approaches to eradicate tumours and to bring them into clinical use. Personalized Medicine uses what we call pharmacogenomics. Treatments like chemotherapy are administered to all patients without taking into consideration molecular level differences, which are addressed by genomics technologies. Chemotherapy can create resistant tumour types that proliferate in an unconstrained way due to an enhanced rate of DNA repair, activation of drug-efflux pumps and genetic, epigenetic and generally -omic alterations that inhibit induction of apoptosis. Furthermore, these conventional chemotherapies are extremely toxic, exerting severe side effects because they disrupt cellular proliferation and DNA metabolism in fast-growing cells of the human body, including those of bone marrow, the gastrointestinal tract and hair follicles. Some severe side effects of chemotherapy include cancer such as leukemia due to massive DNA damage; chemobrain that involves brain damage and memory loss, impaired orientation, brain shrinkage, deterioration of cognitive function and vision problems; systemic toxicity including infections due to immunosuppression, toxicity in the liver, kidney, heart and lungs, anemia, appetite and metabolic changes leading to cachexia and blood clots.