Roche relies on personalized medicine to fight against cancer

Written by Sandeep Nehra

The Swiss pharmaceutical group Roche relies on “personalized medicine” therapies become more targeted and less invasive than conventional treatments, to treat certain cancers that are growing strongly, said on Thursday the lab.

“In a disease that led to the death so far, cancer has become a chronic disease,” said Eckard Klose, head of oncology at Roche Pharma Switzerland.

While conventional methods based chemotherapy attack the tumor so widespread, new therapies called “molecular” used to analyze the tumor and to better target the treatment, “said Mr. Klose at a press conference.

These new treatments, which use the antibody technology, help reduce the mortality of cancer patients. “It establishes a better diagnosis, earlier and more targeted,” he said.

This new therapeutic approach is particularly suited to better fight against skin cancer, one of the most aggressive cancers whose growth in the population is one of the most important.

Each year 160,000 new melanoma are diagnosed worldwide. Until now, the average survival time of patients whose skin cancer has spread to other parts of the body is 8 to 10 months, said Roche.

“This is an incredibly aggressive disease, against which there is virtually no treatment,” insisted Reinhard Dummer, a dermatologist at the University Hospital of Zurich.

Roche is developing a thirty anti-cancer drugs, including its implementation Vémurafénib molecule, for which he filed earlier this year an application for accelerated approval in the European Union and Switzerland, to treat cancer skin.

While in the 1930s, the risk of skin cancer was 1 in 1,500, this ratio has skyrocketed to the early 2000s a ratio of 1 to 75.

To explain the increase in skin cancers, researchers put forward an increase in the intensity of ultraviolet rays, extending the life span and a tendency to practice more outdoor recreation and thus s’ sunlight.

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