Procalcitonin has been more widely tested for optimising antibiotic therapy in both children and adults.
CRP has been tested in various conditions, but only a few of these studies have focused on its use for optimising antibiotic therapy.
Few of them however are eligible for entering the clinical arena (see Additional file 1: Table S1) and being used for optimising antibiotic therapy because of limitations to the interpretation of results from these studies.
The standard rodent models for carcinoma used for the past 30 years to optimise therapy in humans consist of either s.c. xenograft or orthotropic implantation of human tumour cells into athymic mice.
The EORTC and CUETO models were born out of this clinical need to individualise and optimise therapy for NMIBC patients.
35 Therefore, future research is needed for optimising GC bridging therapies.
Moreover, because single components of the Q-Score formula respond to individual weak points in glycaemic control, parameters with improvement potential can be identified and used as targets for optimising patient-tailored therapies.
Thus, in terms of prognosis, current clinical issues are to predict survival for the high-risk group and disease-free survival for the low-risk group in order to optimise therapy.
This suggests that it might be possible to optimise therapy if it was also possible to develop a test to determine which regimen would be most effective for an individual patient.
Despite this, only half of the patients who undergo potentially curative surgery survive for 5 years (McArdle and Hole, 2002), and the challenge of how best to predict prognosis and, thereby optimise therapy remains.
