個體化癌症藥物 新一代精準用藥

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

BBC新聞 – 精準治療是美國臨牀腫瘤協會年會上的大主題之一。

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

癌症是正常細胞因基因突變受損，導致不受控制的生長。

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.

精準治療的概念，就是檢驗每個患者的腫瘤，找出對腫瘤生存變得必需的基因突變，然後選擇靶向藥物對抗突變 – 殺死腫瘤。

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.

這個概念並不新。乳腺癌患者已經可以在其腫瘤經過分析後確定治療方案。受雌激素刺激長出的腫瘤有了可以阻礙女性荷爾蒙的藥物，而藥物赫賽汀僅對20%具有特異性突變的腫瘤起作用。

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.

但遺傳學界發生的革命 - 使科學家能夠快速便宜地盤查癌症的受損基因 – 正激起對新一代精準用藥的興奮巨浪。

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.

這次匯聚3萬名醫生和科學家的世界最大癌症會議，已經聽到了精準治療正在如何幫助戰勝癌症。

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.

來自加州大學聖迭戈分校個體化癌症治療中心的施瓦伊德勒博士，展示了對13203名患者所做的346次高度實驗性的臨牀試驗數據。

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人使用了精準治療……當對腫瘤的薄弱之處使用匹配藥物時，31%的病例出現了腫瘤萎縮，而未用匹配藥物時只有5%。

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

而且，使用精準治療後，病情出現惡化的時間從3個月增加到了近6個月。

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.

施瓦伊德勒博士說，研究結果“令人震撼”，稱讚“我們做基因組學的能力取得驚人進展” - 揭示了腫瘤的內在運行機制。

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.

精準治療應該能對患者帶來巨大好處，因爲它產生的副作用遠比化療或放療小，化療和放療殺死腫瘤的同時也殺死健康細胞。