個別治療化のための分子病理診断の展望

In recent years, classical morphology-based pathological diagnosis has moved into molecular diagnosis which is a mixture of morphology and informations such as specific protein expression, genetic mutation, and chromosomal translocation. The progress of molecular pathological diagnosis（MPD）is accompanied by the development of personalized medicine. For example, in molecular targeted therapy, a choice of drugs depends on whether the cancer cells express the targeted molecule or not. The examination of targeted molecules is mainly done by immunohistochemistry using pathological specimens. Therefore the demands of MPD will increase with the discovery of new targeted molecules and drugs. The first part of this review refers the practices and the challenges for the future about MPD.
In addition to daily practice on MPD in the hospital, we have advanced cancer research in the aspect of an interaction between cancer cells and normal cells to discover new molecular targets. In the latter half of this review, we introduce some of our study results such as the targeted molecules in the animal model of prostate cancer development to the bone and those in the co-culture models between prostate cancer cells and osteoblasts.
MPD is now moving to next stage, pathological diagnosis based on a great deal of genomic information. In association with it, the roles of pathologists must be of increasing significance.