Modern oncology witnesses an increasing number of new effective anticancer drugs targeting specific oncogenic pathways. Despite these advances, real-world experience with targeted single agents is disappointing since drug resistance usually occurs after a short time. This is particularly true for patients with refractory or relapsed T-cell lymphoma (TCL) who so far could not benefit from novel agents and demonstrate a short survival time of only 3 months. The novel genetic information gained from genome-wide high-throughput techniques has greatly improved our understanding of TCL. However, if precision medicine strategies are based solely on genetics, it runs into two major challenges: (1) the heterogeneity within the cancer of an individual patient and (2) the incomplete understanding of the degree of contribution of a specific mutation to a tumor phenotype. Next-generation functional drug screening (ngFDS) aims to address these problems. Studies that proof the clinical utility of ngFDS are currently limited. The following chapter aims to discuss recent advances of ngFDS and to line out its potential for TCL patients.
Part of the book: Peripheral T-cell Lymphomas