Precision Medicine for Cancer Treatment

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Fadlo Khuri, MD
So at the most fundamental level, a cancer patient goes to see their physician and the physician now in many diseases, lung cancer, breast cancer, brain tumors, other diseases, the physician has the opportunity to do genomic studies. Studying the genes of the cancer from that patient. Getting the information back and interpreting it properly can help the physician to work with the patient to give them the most effective and least toxic treatment that will target that individual’s cancer. And using that application, we can select a very precise treatment. It can be an oral drug, it can be a combination of a drug and chemotherapy. It can be an experimental compound. But it allows us to cut to the chase of the treatment we believe will be most precise and most effective. And as a result patients with advanced disease are living longer and we’re trying to take that into other diseases or harnessing the vast power of the immune system based on someone’s genomic make up and the make up of their tumor. This was a great hope 10-15 years ago. It’s a reality today for many cancers.