Making personalized cancer medicine a reality: challenges and opportunities in the development of biomarkers and companion diagnostics.

The origins of this article stem from discussions at the American Association for Cancer Research Clinical and Translational Cancer Research Think Tank meeting held in San Francisco in early 2010. This article synthesizes the opinions and issues considered at that meeting, and discusses many of the important events that have since occurred in the field of personalized cancer medicine. Although investigators continue to make progress in better linking individual patient biology with risk determination, diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment selection, the pace of this progress continues to be limited by many of the issues identified in the meeting.