Figure 1. Combinatorial complexity of combination therapies in personalized medicine.

A: Heatmap visualization of the number of possible combination therapies in dependence on the number of actionable mutations and number of combined drugs. As an example a combination therapy with 3 drugs selected out of a set of 40 compounds yields 9,880 possible combination therapies that would have to be evaluated clinically. B: Heatmap visualization of the number of patients that would have to be screened (i. e. whose tumors would have to be sequenced) to recruit 200 patients into a clinical trial evaluating a combination therapy in dependence on the number of actionable mutations targeted in the combination therapy and the frequency at which they occur in tumors.