New Research Could Advance Research Field Critical to Personalized Medicine

Cancer treatments would be so much more effective if only each patient’s therapy could be uniquely designed to cater to his/her genetic makeup. Noteworthy developments have been made by researchers at the Georgetown Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Centre by using a brand new chip that searches for hundreds of mutations in genes.

Personalized medicine is actually a better approach in order to find the best fitting treatment and optimal dosage levels that would have minimum side effects on the patient. This comes into play much more now with new developments being made every day, new drugs manufactured and new treatments discovered. The reason behind the need for personalized treatment options is that each person’s genes are varied, encoding proteins – which determines the effectiveness of the drug and its side effects as well.

John F. Deeken, a pharmacogenetic researcher at Lombardi said, “Currently, available genotyping tools test only a few genes at a time. With a new chip called DMET, as many as 170 genes can be examined for more than a thousand variations. This type of turnkey testing, if validated, could eventually replace highly specialized, time consuming and labor intensive testing — thus allowing more institutes the opportunity to pursue genotyping and pharmocogenetic research. That alone would be a significant development for our field and for expediting the research many of us believe is the future of medicine.”

Developments such as this are vital for cancer research that will help with creating new drugs and treatments as well. If this pans out well and genetic coding can be monitored in the future, then unique medicines can be doled out, based on genetic variations that are linked to the effectiveness of the drug as well as its toxicity.