个体化癌症药物 新一代精准用药

BBC News – Precision medicine is one of the big themes at the annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology. 

BBC新闻 – 精准治疗是美国临床肿瘤协会年会上的大主题之一。

Cancers are normal cells that have become corrupted by mutations in their DNA that leads to uncontrolled growth.

癌症是正常细胞因基因突变受损，导致不受控制的生长。

The idea of precision medicine is to test every patient's tumour, find the mutations that have become essential for it to survive and then select a targeted drug to counter-act the mutation - killing the tumour.

精准治疗的概念，就是检验每个患者的肿瘤，找出对肿瘤生存变得必需的基因突变，然后选择靶向药物对抗突变 – 杀死肿瘤。

This concept is not new. Women with breast cancer already have their tumours analysed to decide on treatment. Tumours whose growth is fuelled by oestrogen have drugs to block the female sex hormone, while the drug Herceptin works in only the 20% of tumours that have specific mutations. 

这个概念并不新。乳腺癌患者已经可以在其肿瘤经过分析后确定治疗方案。受雌激素刺激长出的肿瘤有了可以阻碍女性荷尔蒙的药物，而药物赫赛汀仅对20%具有特异性突变的肿瘤起作用。

But a revolution in genetics - allowing scientists to rapidly and cheaply interrogate a cancer's corrupted DNA - is leading to huge excitement about a new generation of precision drugs.

但遗传学界发生的革命 - 使科学家能够快速便宜地盘查癌症的受损基因 – 正激起对新一代精准用药的兴奋巨浪。

The world's largest cancer conference - a meeting of 30,000 doctors and scientists - has already heard how a precision approach is helping to beat cancer.

这次汇聚3万名医生和科学家的世界最大癌症会议，已经听到了精准治疗正在如何帮助战胜癌症。

Dr Maria Schwaederle, from the centre for personalised cancer therapy at the University of California, San Diego, has presented data on 346 highly experimental clinical trials involving 13,203 patients.

来自加州大学圣迭戈分校个体化癌症治疗中心的施瓦伊德勒博士，展示了对13203名患者所做的346次高度实验性的临床试验数据。

Of the studies, 58 used a precision approach…Cancers shrank in 31% of cases when a drug was matched to the tumour's weaknesses compared with just 5% of the time without.

研究中58人使用了精准治疗……当对肿瘤的薄弱之处使用匹配药物时，31%的病例出现了肿瘤萎缩，而未用匹配药物时只有5%。

And the time before the disease worsened increased from three months to nearly six months with precision medicine.

而且，使用精准治疗后，病情出现恶化的时间从3个月增加到了近6个月。

Dr Schwaederle said the findings were "striking" and praised the "breath-taking advances in our ability to perform genomics" that was revealing the inner workings of tumours.

施瓦伊德勒博士说，研究结果“令人震撼”，称赞“我们做基因组学的能力取得惊人进展” - 揭示了肿瘤的内在运行机制。

Precision medicine should be hugely beneficial for patients as it has far fewer side effects than either chemotherapy or radiotherapy which kill healthy tissue as well as the tumour.

精准治疗应该能对患者带来巨大好处，因为它产生的副作用远比化疗或放疗小，化疗和放疗杀死肿瘤的同时也杀死健康细胞。