[Molecular diagnostic and targeted therapy--"Barking dogs are going to bite": presentations from the 42nd Annual Meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology, Atlanta 2006].

This years ASCO-meeting reinforced the trend of the recent years to get off from empirical treatment concepts to tailored and individualized diagnostics and therapy. However, the basis for an individual therapy is a specific molecular diagnostic which can be reflected in the analysis of hormonal receptor, HER-1, HER-2 and topoisomerase IIalpha in breast cancer. All these markers are not only able to prognosticate the course of disease but they also can predict the success of specific treatment approaches. Trastuzumab is standard therapy in HER-2 positive breast cancer both in the adjuvant and palliative setting. But new therapeutic agents, as e. g. lapatinib, are promising in the treatment of HER-2 positive breast cancer even if trastuzumab is failing. Otherwise it might possibly be an alternative option but adequate clinical results have to be awaited. The targeted inactivation of EGFR-related signal transduction pathways by e. g. gefitinib did not show a substantial improvement neither as a single agent nor in combination with endocrine treatment. However, the appropriate subgroup which might benefit from this therapy has to be defined even if molecular data suggest that patients with ER positive and PR negative breast cancer might be such a group. The increasing knowledge in terms of the biology of bone metastasis led to the development of new treatment options as e. g. denosumab, a humanized monoclonal antibody for RANK ligand. Two adjuvant cytotoxic treatment trials revealed that taxanes improve the prognosis of node positive breast cancer and should be administered sequentially. The advantage of switching to an aromatase inhibitor after two to three years of tamoxifen in endocrine treatment of postmenopausal patients is proved by two clinical trials (IES, ARNO) which could demonstrate a survival benefit. In conclusion it seems to be evident that new targeted therapy options are effective and will set new standards for the treatment of breast cancer patients in the near future. The presentation for the ovarian cancer focused on the addition of a third cytotoxic agent to carboplatin and paclitaxel as the standard therapy for the primary treatment of ovarian cancer. New data of Bevacizumab in the treatment of primary and recurrent ovarian cancer were presented. However, this is not yet a standard treatment for all patients and needs further investigations within large, multicentre, randomised trials. The lymphonodectomy as part of the primary therapy of the endometrial cancer seems to be a benefit at least in patients with advanced disease or high risk stage I tumours. The adjuvant therapy of uterine sarcomas is still not yet very well investigated and clear. A trial which recruited 12 years demonstrated a benefit in overall survival which has to be interpreted with caution. In this year again there have been registered an increasing number of interesting contributions from Germany, which also received international attention.