The field of oncology has witnessed substantial changes with various emerging technologies and an increasing focus on precision medicine for constructive therapies in cancer treatments.

Now, cancer diagnostics are not solely dependent on direct tumor tissue biopsy for cancer detection, diagnosis, and treatment monitoring.

Numerous druggable tumor-specific molecular aberrations have substantially grown in the past decade, having a significant survival benefit obtained through several biomarker-matching therapies for various types of cancers.

Additionally, molecular oncology diagnostics also plays an essential role in the diagnosis and prognosis of different types of cancers and in improving patient outcomes.

This article will briefly discuss various therapies in cancer treatment along with the role of molecular oncology diagnostics in cancer prognosis.  

What are molecular oncology diagnostics?

Molecular diagnostics in oncology are tests that are performed to detect genetic material, proteins, or related molecules, providing detailed information about health or disease. These tests are performed on blood, saliva, or tumor tissue samples.

Molecular oncology diagnostics has transformed cancer care for both common and rare malignancies. The implementation of molecular diagnostics can help specific therapies target cancer cells and improve clinical outcomes in patients, making the treatment for cancer more effective. The current and emerging approaches in the field of oncology highlight successes and challenges while proposing potential solutions in the implementation of precision medicine and clinical research practice in cancer treatment.

The expansion to other molecular characterization technologies beyond genomics, such as transcriptomics, epigenetics, and immunophenotyping, and the evaluation of drug combinations beyond monotherapy approaches will hopefully increase the clinical utility and scope of precision medicine.

Role of Molecular Oncology Diagnostics in Various Cancer Therapies

Oncology includes a range of different types of medications, such as targeted therapies, immunotherapies, chemotherapy agents, and hormone therapies. Some common therapies having applications in various cancer treatments are:

Chemotherapy: Drugs in chemotherapy are chemical agents that destroy fast-growing cancer cells in the body. Chemotherapy aims to reduce the total number of cancer cells in the body while lowering the chances of cancer spreading to other parts of the body.

Tumor characteristics during cancer become highly heterogeneous in terms of molecular profile, mutational burden, and immune features. Thus, genetic information related to cancer that is based on molecular diagnosis can result in new fields of integrative medicine, such as molecular pathological epidemiology.

Hormone Therapy: Hormone therapy relies on the behavior of hormones during cancer treatment. This therapy is generally used for the treatment of breast cancer, which is caused by changes in estrogen and progesterone hormones, and prostate cancer, which is caused by changes in the androgen hormone.

The ability to specifically target cancer pathways has become a promising area in the field of oncology research, due to which the molecular mechanisms that are involved in various types of cancers are becoming elucidated.

In response to this, many clinical guidelines for several cancers are now recommending molecular diagnostic testing for known molecular biomarkers and genomic alterations.

Targeted Therapy: Targeted therapies seek out and kill cancerous cells without harming the normal cells in the body. Drugs used during targeted therapy block the molecular pathways that are likely to grow tumor cells.

Targeted therapy has been very effective in several metastatic cancers. Specific gene mutations and sophisticated molecular diagnostics that include next-generation sequencing enable great chances of risk assessment and treatment selection, which aims to prevent treatment failure, improve survival rate, and avoid unnecessary treatment processes for certain types of cancer.

Immunotherapy: Immunotherapy uses the immune system of the body to attack cancer cells. It is a type of targeted therapy that blocks the mechanism by which cancer cells find strategic ways of hiding in the immune system of the body.

Molecular diagnostic testing increases the frequency of immunotherapy and clinical practices for specific cancer types and has generally identified high rates of accurate test results.

Industry Overview of Molecular Oncology Diagnostics

Due to the high number of applications performed by kits and their ease of integration in cancer research, the global molecular oncology diagnostics market is expected to be dominated by kits and assays of molecular oncology diagnostics.

According to the BIS Research report, the global molecular oncology diagnostics market was valued at $3.62 billion in 2021 and is anticipated to reach $12.13 billion by 2032, witnessing a CAGR of 11.43% during the forecast period 2022-2032.

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Moreover, the rising prevalence of cancers and increased transformations in biomarker identification are expected to drive growth in the global molecular oncology diagnostics market.

Conclusion

Though the global molecular oncology diagnostics market is a well-established market, due to the continuous increase in the demand for innovative products in molecular oncology diagnostics, it is expected to grow further in the coming years.

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