Personalized treatment of breast cancer

Cancer therapy is moving definitely towards personalized therapy that maximize the benefits for the right selected patients with cost savings. The paradigm of personalized therapy in breast cancer is applying specific drugs to the specific molecular targets by better understanding of molecular biology of breast cancer that has been switched from previous giving the same treatment to presumed homogeneous patients based on histology. In the last several years, many next generation sequencing (NGS)-based studies have been carried out to provide a comprehensive molecular characterization of cancers, to identify novel genetic alterations contributing to oncogenesis, cancer progression and metastasis. These efforts have yielded significant achievements for breast cancers also. In this paper, we review the recent advances in NGS-based cancer genomic research as well as current challenges for its clinical application, and discuss the future directions in the research for the advanced achievement and cooperative works.