The SEOM XII National Congress held in Barcelona, has been the setting for the presentation of the book “Molecular biology in cancer. Approach to new therapies, “which was coordinated by Dr. Jesus Garcia-Foncillas, director of Oncology at the University Clinic of Navarra. The publication, produced in collaboration with Amgen’s oncology Spain, has been published in both English and Castilian by Prous Thomson Reuters.
As explained by Dr. Garcia-Foncillas in the presentation, the book aims to “bring molecular biology to clinical oncology impacting on the development of new therapies and new prognostic and predictive biomarkers of the more didactic way possible.” In his view, there has been a model of cancer treatment approach based on empiricism to a rational model where the drugs are directed toward molecular events that are crucial in carciogénesis and acquiring a more aggressive or resistant phenotype . “Clinical Oncology is now in the paradigm that increasingly necessary to use markers that define not only the prognosis but also to predict response and toxicity to a particular treatment. These treatments will emerge from the analysis of metabolic pathways which act on these new anticancer drugs. This requires the clinician to understand the bases of the disease, the mechanism of drug action and the rationale underlying the use of a biomarker, “he argued.
To facilitate understanding
The book, 860 pages, is accompanied by a CD-ROM with animations, as the rapporteur, “provide knowledge of this most fascinating and much-needed pace to understand the mechanism that underlies most of the new drugs . Thus, one can see the life cycle of human papillomavirus carciogénesis models with stem cells, the Notch signaling pathway, pathways of signal transduction EGFR/HER2 or signaling pathways associated with RANK / RANKL in osteoclastogenesis, among many other disease-related processes.
For the development of the various chapters were chosen to numerous national and international experts “with an objective of education, which cover subjects as diverse as carciogénesis, molecular techniques, clinical trials, bioinformatics or statistical factors, harmonizing the global orientation each author with the overall context of the work both in content and images and animations.