Difference between revisions of "Team:NCTU Formosa/Description"

Cancers, the last thing that human beings would like to get involved. Everyone wishes to have clean bills of health no matter in what age. Nowadays, the top cancers include lung cancer, colorectal cancer, breast cancer, melanoma and thyroid cancer. According to National Cancer Institute(NCI), in 2015, the estimated number of new cases of these cancers are 724,410. The estimated death cases of these cancers are 260,360.So, it is inevitable for some situations to suffer cancers, and we would all be desperate to have the most effective and appropriate therapies to beat up cancers. Eventually, targeted drug, a precise therapy directly identifying the cancer cells has been invented.

Targeted drug therapy becomes widely used over time. As we known that targeted drug therapies are more precisely attack cancer cells, which can increase the treatment efficiency by a large margin. In Figure 1, in 2003, targeted drug therapy is not commonly used compared with other therapies, accounting for only 11% usage. Over one decade, it is estimated that the usage of targeted drug therapy dramatically increases to 46%. It becomes the top therapy in cancer treatments among others. According to the statistics, the usage of targeted drugs therapy does have effective treatment in cancer, decreasing the morality of cancer and increasing the five-year survival rate after treatment.

One of a kind of targeted drugs therapy is monoclonal antibody. It blocks the growth and spread of cancer by interfering with specific molecules("molecular targets") that are involved in the growth, progression, and spread of cancers. Furthermore, the research also indicated that utilizing different targeted drugs to treat cancers simultaneously attain greater effects than only using one targeted drug. However, targeted drugs therapy must treat patients in the proper condition to reach the best effect of the therapy. What's worse, the improper usage of targeted drugs therapy would not only waste money and medical resources but also cause the invalid treatment result to patients. Above all,defining whether to use the targeted drugs might be the crucial point of targeted drugs therapy.That is, if doctor can prescribe the proper targeted drugs that specific to every patient's condition, it will reach to a direct personalized medicine method for using targeted drugs therapy Therefore, NCTU_Formosa focuses on creating a multimarker diagnosis platform for helping doctors to judge whether to use monoclonal antibody targeted drugs by innovative method directly.