Chemotherapy and Personalized Medicine: New Approaches in Modern Cancer Treatment

Chemotherapy has been an important part of cancer treatment for many years. However, its efficacy is often limited because conventional chemotherapy can cause serious side effects and lead to differences in treatment response between patients. At this point, personalized medicine offers a new approach to eliminating these problems in cancer treatment. Personalized medicine proposes organizing treatment according to the genetic and molecular characteristics of both the tumor and the patient with tailored treatment regimens. Through molecular profiling of the patient and the tumor, oncologists can have a preliminary idea about the most effective drug, allowing them to adjust the treatment specifically for the individual and minimize the harmful effects on healthy tissues. Advances in genomics and precision oncology, and also new platforms such as organoids and organ-on-chips, have made it possible to select drugs, based on tumor-specific biomarkers, genomic alterations, and pharmacogenomic variants.However, there are still some challenges in applying personalized chemotherapy. The main reasons are concerns about the reliability of biomarkers, integration of genomic data into clinical practice, cost-effectiveness, and ethical issues related to genetic privacy. This review summarizes the basic concepts of tumor biology and chemotherapy and discusses how personalized medicine and precision oncology are changing cancer treatment.