Translational cancer research towards Thailand 4.0

Cancer is still a major cause of mortality in the Thai population. The heterogeneity and complexity of cancer make this disease often result in ineffective treatment and a fatal outcome. Primary prevention for a knownrisk cancer is one way to minimize the number of new cancer cases; however, effective treatment with reasonable cost-effectiveness is important for cancer patients. Basic and preclinical cancer research are necessary for better and deeper understanding of the nature of cancer. Several research initiatives should be implemented to translate the preclinical developments to clinical outcome. High specificity and sensitivity of tumour markers in serum or secretory fluids are helpful for diagnosis of cancer before advanced, high cost, or invasive diagnoses are implemented. A set of potential markers instead of a single marker should be researched to increase the diagnostic power of the tests for a particular cancer. Simplicity, low cost, and highly effective diagnostic power of the test is also required to validate a test for clinical use. The knowledge generated at the molecular level together with the advanced technologies of next-generation sequencing, cellular and molecular biology, and computational biology, provide a new trend of precise treatment against individual cancers. Histoculture drug response assays or in vitro chemo-sensitivity assays, genomic profiling of tumours by next-generation sequencing, drug repositioning for cancer, and chimeric antigen receptor T-cell therapy are exciting approaches that lead to precise and effective therapy for cancer patients. In this review, several new directions for the precise diagnosis and effective treatments of cancer are highlighted.