Who Can Benefit from Precision Medicine?

It is already becoming more widely used, the pace is accelerating and my suspicion is within the next 3 to 5 years, almost half of all cancer patients, if not most cancer patients, in the United States and in North America will be getting some degree of FDA approved genomic testing of their cancer in a way that can influence their treatment. I think precision medicine is a great leap forward, but it’s not a miracle cure. We still are detecting patient’s cancers in advanced stage far too often. We still get patients who have incurable cancers the overwhelming amount of the time for certain, nearly fatal diseases like lung cancer and pancreatic cancer and certain types of thyroid cancer as examples. When precision medicine, genomic medicine will be at it’s most powerful, will be when we can detect the cancer in this stage before it gets invasive and treat it or remove it then and there. That I think is the great hope. That will shift our population and our people to being detected earlier and being treated with more precise medicines.