Being able to identify patients who will or will not benefit from specific treatment types is one of the reasons why evaluation of potential predictive markers is an important topic in the medical field.
Predictive markers are patient characteristics that are measured objectively and are used to determine subgroups of patients that will most likely respond to a given type of treatment. They allow the physician to be able to choose which treatment will provide the highest likelihood of benefit to the patient. Together with surrogate endpoints and prognostic markers, they play an increasing role in the personalization of medicine, including in diagnosis, selection of treatment and prognosis. Personalized medicine in turn improves medical decision making, enabling better patient management by helping to minimize unnecessary, possibly dangerous side effects that may occur with wrong treatment choices. Inevitably, this helps reduce the time taken to determine if a therapy will provide any benefit, and as a result reduce cost to both patient and a wider health community. …show more content…
Prognostic markers focus on outcome in the absence of therapy or with the use of standard treatment that patients will most likely receive. They are considered a measure of the natural history of the disease. Predictive markers on the other hand are concerned with a response or lack of response to a particular treatment type, with the response being defined using a clinical endpoint. Predictive markers imply differential benefit from treatment which depends on the presence or absence of the predictive marker. Statistically speaking it defines an interaction between treatment benefit and biomarker status and is best evaluated in an RCT with a control group (Clark,