Opinion: Personalized Medicine Is The Solution To Modern Cancer Treatment
The following is an opinion article written by Laura Towart, CEO and founder of My Personal Therapeutics, a London based digital health company offering advanced personalized cancer therapeutics. Their Personal Discovery Process uses fruit fly “avatars” to genetically mimic a patient’s cancer to identify drug combinations against the specific cancer. You can learn more about the company by reading this BioSpace article or going to their website.
The medical sector is getting carried away with a “one size fits all” approach to cancer treatment.
A cancer diagnosis simply means the patient has a condition that propagates abnormal cells within their body. This condition’s underlying cause and characteristics will naturally differ between patients, but oncologists tend to prescribe a shockingly consistent course of treatment: anti-cancer medication and a course of chemotherapy. An estimated 1,735,350 Americans were diagnosed with cancer in 2018, but 1.7 million people can’t all be the same.
Consumers have come to expect high levels of personalization from their smartphones, home designs, and online shopping experiences, and end up enjoying these things more as a result. They also deserve a personalized approach in cancer treatment that considers their unique genetic traits and the latest medical research — this methodology stands a significantly increased chance of pushing back against the disease.
Personalized medicine tailors medical treatment to each patient’s unique characteristics
Factoring in conventional data points about the individual patient is just the start: their medical history, which country they’re from, and how physically active they are certainly constitute useful markers to guide treatment. But now it’s possible to go several layers beyond that and achieve a fuller picture by sampling the patient’s DNA, gaining a view into the genetic recipe that makes them who they are.
When scientists sequenced the complete human genome in 2003, it unlocked a new era of medical possibilities. There are approximately 3 billion pairs of chemical building blocks (called bases) in the human genome; the order in which they appear reveals the genetic information that each segment of DNA carries. In other words, medical researchers had developed a kind of Rosetta Stone for human genetic information. This forms the underpinning for personalized medicine today.
Medical professionals working in this arena can enhance their understanding of how someone’s unique molecular and genetic profile might leave them vulnerable to certain diseases or conditions, whether that information was already medically known or not. Where previous approaches to cancer treatment presented oncologists with a set of assumed best practices, personalized medicine gives them a figurative telescope to explore many possible treatments and determine one with an optimal outcome.
Fruit flies can be a powerful weapon for personalized medicine professionals
Medical researchers can use fruit flies to see the future. At the surface level, these kitchen pests have basically nothing to do with human biology, but they actually share up to 75 percent of the genes associated with human disease. They’re furthermore one of the most genetically malleable organisms out there, capable of handling 15 mutations or more.
They present us with a valuable analog to see how a human body will metabolize and distribute a drug. A tumor generated in the fly gut can resemble a human colorectal tumor. As it’s inside the body (instead of on a cancer cell culture plate), it actually interacts with other organs in a long-range communication process. In other words, medical researchers like the ones at Mount Sinai’s Center for Personalised Cancer Therapeutics (CPCT) or at partner company My Personal Therapeutics can direct a genetically similar tumor to grow inside of a fruit fly, then experiment on it to see what kind of treatment works. Because fruit fly lifespans are very short, it’s easy to do this at a large scale and get meaningful results very quickly.
Personalized medicine will change the way we think about, identify, and manage cancer
You’ve probably heard the term “big data” before in reference to business and internet technology. When the medical world collects highly precise data about individual patients at scale, it effectively lays the foundation for a comparative database that will make high-quality diagnoses quicker and more affordable in the future. In the long term, this will present doctors with trusted shortcuts for providing more accurate cancer treatment.
Imagine that personalized medicine has been the norm for 20 years and every physician has access to data that compares symptoms and treatments across all individuals. Doctors would only need to plug your vital statistics into a database and check them against your declared symptoms in order to see what worked for other people just like you. When I say “just like you,” I really mean it. This is the value of big data — we’ll eventually be able to segment out previous patients of all different demographics with deep specificity.
The future of cancer treatment is much like the future of medicine at large. It’s going to depend on highly individualized approaches that harness all of a patient’s data, from their lifestyle to their genetic code. Genetic methodologies grant medical professionals access to a fuller picture of patient health than they’ve ever had before. It’s time to start using them on an individual basis in order to ensure high-quality outcomes for cancer patients.
You don’t need to be a medical expert to know one size doesn’t fit all.