WCCS/EADO 2016 | What makes an ideal biomarker

Jürgen Becker, MD, PhD from the University Hospital Essen, Essen, Germany speaks to us on the importance of stratified treatments for cancer patients at the 2016 World Congress on Cancers of the Skin (WCCS) and the Congress of the European Association of Dermato-Oncology (EADO) in Vienna, Austria. Dr Becker explains that identifying predictive biomarkers will help to provide insight into how patients will respond to different treatments. The development on biomarkers is a challenging field and many under investigation are not robust enough to make into the clinic. Dr Becker voices his concern that the validation of biomarkers is not as well-regulated as drugs tested in clinical trials. It is important to be able to prove that the biomarker under investigation is successful in addressing what it is intended to address. Dr Becker describes the ideal biomarker as tumor, patient and therapy specific, in his opinion a biomarker should be tailored to the patient as much as the therapy.