Discussion

The current focus in cancer research is to personalize chemotherapy by using biomarkers and genotyping. Another approach, which is currently out of favour, is to measure cell death directly. We believe this second approach has utility at helping get the right drug to the right patient and we present data obtained from both ovarian and glioblastoma patients showing distinct dose response curves to many chemotherapies. While this work has obvious clinical applications, another benefit is that it may help large pharma optimize clinical trials by enriching the study population for patients that will respond to their research compound.