Some cancer patients respond well to a particular cancer therapy or combination of therapies.
Others do not, but may respond to a different treatment. If doctors knew how to tell those patients apart, they could individualize treatment by designing an optimum therapy for each cancer patient. The chip technology, they believe, will illuminate the process of cancer development. Such detailed new information can then be used to identify critical molecules for development of cancer therapies. They also hope the tissue chip will help them learn how to distinguish among subgroups of cancer patients and eventually predict which ones will respond to specific therapies.