In 2022 alone, there were nearly 20 million new cancer cases and 9.7 million cancer-related deaths worldwide, per a report by the National Cancer Institute (NCI). By 2040, the NCI predicts, the number of new cancer cases per year will rise to 29.9 million, and the number of cancer-related deaths will climb to 15.3 million. And though biotech and medtech companies are innovating and devising several ways to effectively treat cancer, it remains the number-one cause of death by disease among children and adolescents in the U.S.

For decades, cancer treatment has been a blunt force trauma approach, with treatments like chemotherapy and radiation therapy. While such treatments often yield good results, they can be brutal and have devastating effects on patients, attacking both healthy and cancerous cells alike. “These therapies can only take a patient so far because of resistance mechanisms that develop and/or tolerability and safety issues that arise,” says Ron Bentsur, CEO of the clinical stage biopharmaceutical company Nuvectis.

This is where precision medicine steps in to help flip the script. By analyzing a patient’s tumor on a molecular level, and factoring in a patient’s genetics and environment, doctors can identify the specific mutations causing cancerous growth. This allows them to target therapies that exploit these weaknesses, maximizing effectiveness and minimizing side effects.

Apart from regulatory bottlenecks that biopharmaceutical companies must navigate during clinical tests for personalized drugs developed for cancer patients, it’s often difficult to get the same results while treating patients. That’s true across the board—and with precision medicine. As Diana Azzam, an environmental health sciences professor at Florida International University, notes in The Conversation, “even though two people with the same cancer might get the same medicine, they can have very different outcomes.”

Another barrier: certain types of cancers, like lung cancer for example, are classified as “cancers of unmet need” and difficult to diagnose and treat.

But things are starting to change.

A RAY OF HOPE

Tara Bishop, founder at medtech VC firm Black Opal Ventures, says with precision medicine, we’re now seeing treatments for cancers that were previously thought untreatable—like lung, liver, and kidney cancers. She credits a number of developments over the past decade. “One is the idea of actually understanding things called biomarkers, which are either proteins that are on the surface of a cell or genetic changes of a tumor that we now can test for when we diagnose someone with cancer,” she says. “That concept of actually being able to understand at a cellular level what’s happening with a tumor and a cancer cell has allowed us to actually customize and personalize the treatments for those cancers.”