‘Precision Medicine’ Eliminates Trial and Error in Cancer Treatment
Have you heard about Precision Medicine? It is simply the Practice of Medicine tailored to suit the individual. It is a whole new field being developed. In fact, In January, President Obama announced the Precision Medicine Initiative, a $215-million dollar effort to develop more targeted treatments and move us toward an era of truly personalized medicine.
The first drugs are being developed for cancer, but researchers say it also holds promise for other common diseases like diabetes, multiple sclerosis, and rheumatoid arthritis.
Joanne Inamdar no longer has breast cancer. She is in complete remission. But in a laboratory in Manhattan, there are about a dozen mice that do have breast cancer. In fact, they have Inamdar’s breast cancer.
The tumor that once grew in Inamdar’s breast is now growing on the backs of mice specially bred to have no immune system. If her cancer comes back one day, those mice could save her life.
The mice are part of a new approach to cancer called “precision medicine.” It might also be called “personalized medicine.” As we unlock the secrets of our DNA, we are learning that tumors are as individual as people. Each has a genetic fingerprint we can identify – and target.
Drugs are developed and tested for the average patient with a particular disease. But most of us aren’t average. So many of the drugs in a doctor’s arsenal don’t fit the actual patients being treated any more than a standard size shoe would.
That is particularly true for tumors whose genetic signature makes them hard to treat, like Joanne’s.
“The standard, one-size-fits-all chemotherapy is often given, but that may not apply to any particular patient,” saysHanna Irie, MD, Inamdar’s oncologist and a cancer researcher at the Dubin Breast Center of the Tisch Cancer Institute at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York. “Right now, what we do is trial and error.” says Dr. Irie.
To eliminate that trial and error, Irie and other researchers are assembling a database of tumors like Inamdar’s, grown on mice, in order to do the experiments that will allow them to develop those more targeted treatments tailored to each individual patient.
“In effect, you’re creating an avatar or model to mirror the patient… that we’ll be able to use to screen for the most effective drugs for each individual patient’s cancer,” says Irie.
After eight rounds of chemotherapy, surgery and then radiation, Inamdar is in remission. She volunteered, not for herself, but to help other women. “If parts of my tumor could help in their research project,” she says, “I was more than happy to be a participant.”
But those mice carrying her tumor could also save Inamdar’s life if her cancer were to come back. She had so-called triple-negative breast cancer, meaning her tumor did not have the three most common receptors used by chemotherapy drugs to attack the cancer. That makes it more difficult to treat, and it means there are fewer options for preventing a recurrence.
“I think what frightened me the most was after you were done with your course of chemo… there was no daily dose of medication to take for the rest of your life, like Tamoxifen,” Inamdar says.
Tamoxifen is taken by thousands of women at risk of breast cancer, but it is not effective against triple-negative breast cancer. So Inamdar says the study is “also an insurance policy for myself, that my tumor could reside in their bank in a mouse and maybe, you know, God forbid I get this in the future, they could test perhaps targeted drugs against my specific tumor to help me.”
(Written by By Dr. Sanjay Gupta. Copyright © 2015 Everyday Health Media, LLC)
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