Cancer biomarkers discovery and validation: State of the art, problems and future perspectives

Cancer is one of the major public health problems worldwide representing the leading cause of morbidity and mortality in industrialized countries. To reduce cancer morbidity and mortality as well as to facilitate the evolution from the traditional “one size fi ts all” strategy to a new “personalized” cancer therapy (i.e., the right drug to the right patient at the right time, using the right dose and schedule), there is an urgent need of reliable, robust, accurate and validated cancer biomarker tests. Unfortunately, despite the impressive advances in tumor biology research as well as in high-powerful “omics” technologies, the translation of candidate cancer biomarkers from bench to bedside is lengthy and challenging and only a few tumor marker tests have been adopted successfully into routine clinical care of oncologic patients. This chapter provides an updated background on biomarkers research in oncology, including biomarkers clinical uses, and discusses the problems of discovery pipeline, biomarkers failures and future perspectives. © Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2015.