Personalized medicine should consist of a methodological therapy approach. Therefore, metastatic tumors have to be rendered usable for innovative action-theoretical therapy approaches to generate therapy-relevant tumor models and to uncover novel patterns of targets.
A new therapeutic level could be accomplished by introducing a pragmatic communication theory based on clinical results from less toxic combined biomodulatory therapies, altering the validity and denotation of cellular biochemical processes. A post-genomic view expands the role of proteins as an element within a network of communicative interactions. In a more abstract way, proteins and cells can be expressed as systems objects, which acquire contextual functions within circumscriptive functional modules or within the holistic communicative network of a tumor system. Biomodulatory therapies allow access to modular systems features as well as to the discrepancies between the functionality of single cell systems within a tumor compartment and the site-specific systems requirements of an organ (rationalization).
This way, modular tumor architectures, rationalization processes, deformations, and the Achilles’ heels of tumor systems may be implemented into therapeutic considerations to expand therapy options by individual systems-relevant and stage-relevant features (secretome, molecular imaging). Multi-level decision-making during therapy, i.e. biomarker-guided selection of therapies for individual patients, consecutively necessitates novel trial designs.
Selection of patients for therapy could be replaced by selecting therapies for patients, corresponding to the stage-dependent developmental status of a tumor system in an individual patient.