Symptomics: a fundamental component of precision medicine in oncology research and clinical routine care with relevance for patients’ daily life

Precision medicine bears the promise of truly personalized cancer care informed by functional genomics disclosing the cellular biology of a tumour. This positive development has not reduced the value of physical signs and symptoms in diagnosing a cancer disease. Patient-reported outcomes data are increasingly used as endpoints in clinical trials and practice in cancer care, with a broad scope as easy-to-use online applications support registering health-related and life-style data. Symptoms are also shown to have prognostic value and can be used in monitoring cancer disease for detection of disease progress that prompt action. In this paper we introduce the term “symptome” as a distinct conceptual, semantic entity and “symptomics” to be on par with other omics. We refer to classifications enabling a systematic collection of symptom data and propose that symptomics should be included in multi-omics studies to extend their scope in addition to biological markers. There is convincing evidence in recent literature that using symptom information will bring benefits to prevention, diagnostics, planning treatment, assessing treatment effects, and the follow-up of patients. Consequently, symptomics should be systematically used in the clinical management of cancers as a complement to the follow-up by scheduled regular visits at predefined time intervals, where continuous registration would identify alarming symptoms that prompt a contact in order to trigger a necessary clinical intervention.