Cancer as a generic disease remains a major health problem for developed countries and is becoming a major problem in developing countries. According to the American Cancer Society, 68% of the people diagnosed with cancer between 1999 and 2005 survived their disease; only 50% of the people diagnosed in 1974-75 survived.  However, despite this improvement in treatment and outcome, cancer remains the number one or two cause of death in most western countries. Luxembourg, like other developed countries, has a relatively high incidence and mortality. The lifetime risk of cancer is approximately 33% with lung and colon cancer accounting for 25% of the cases and 40% of the cancer deaths.

CRP-Santé created a personalized medicine project in lung cancer in collaboration with the Partnership for Personalized Medicine (PPM), which involved partners in the United States : Dr. Lee Hartwell, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center (FHCRC), and the Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen) in Arizona. The PPM investigators seek to discover, evaluate and verify biomarkers in blood or tumour to stratify late stage lung cancer patients to the most appropriate chemotherapeutic protocol.

The cancer programme in the PMC initiative includes the PPM lung cancer project and will soon expand to include colon and breast cancers. All three cancers represent serious health challenges in Luxembourg and existing data already illustrate the potentialo for personalized approaches to the treatment of all three cancers.