Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology, University of MunichGroßhadern, Marchioninistrasse 15, D-81377 Munich, Germany
* Email: christian.dannecker{at}med.uni-muenchen.de
We thank Paul Wright for his comment [1]. We are also convinced that the use of biochips will open up new dimensions in diagnostic and therapeutic practice in the future [2
]. The DNA microarray technique holds the promise of revolutionizing future medicine unlike any other technology that was available in the past [3
]. The possibility of monitoring simultaneously the expression of thousands of genes or proteins in one experiment will hopefully give us a global insight into cancer biology on a molecular basis. There are already several promising applications of the microarray technique in clinical medicine [4
6
]. With regard to therapy of cervical cancer, gene expression profiling by DNA microarray may be used for further molecular classification of disease stages and prediction of treatment response [7
, 8
]. However, the microarray technique is still a topic of research, and with regard to clinical medicine it is still in its infancy. Many well designed prospective and controlled trials will be necessary to evaluate the relevance of this new and promising technique. As long as we do not have the published data from such studies, it is imperative to improve the diagnostic and therapeutic options in small steps. Both techniques, self-sampling of HPV DNA (which improves cervical cancer screening) and the sentinel node procedure (which reduces surgery-related morbidity), are good examples of such small, but important, steps [9
, 10
].
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