Monthly Archives: August 2015

Genética

Can personalised treatments transform cancer into a chronic condition?

Today a single cure for cancer doesn’t exist, but in the words of Bridie Smith from the Sydney Morning Herald’s, there have been advances in identifying and understanding various subtypes of different forms of this type of disease and in making patient’s treatments more personalised for these diseases.

Dr. Kylie Mason from the Royal Melbourne Hospital and Melbourne University said: “every patient is an individual”, referring to the evidence that every patient responds in a different way than somebody else to the same condition or the same named diagnosis.
“We are not treating a cancer, we are treating a patient”, Dr. Mason added.

Another voice from the Royal Melbourne Hospital, Jayesh Desai, added: “to be able to do molecular and genomic tests allows us to much better understand what makes a patient’s cancer behave in a particular way and that will allow for more tailored treatments”.
He is convinced that determining the causes at a molecular level that lead to cancer will enable more personalized treatments.

While a cure against cancer is not discovered yet, Smith says that with the recent promising work into immunotherapies, this disease could be transformed into a chronic condition.

Source

Related genetic studies 

Sharing the genetic data help us all

David Haussler from the University of California Santa Cruz,
known for his work leading the team who made the first human genome sequencing 15 years ago,
as asked patients to share their genetic data in order to upgrade personalized medicine.

When the human genome was sequenced for the first time,
the genetic analysis was made public and freely accessible to anyone.

Haussler says that sharing this genetic data was a game-changer and made a number of advances possible.
“The era of precision medicine is upon us.”
He added that these genetic analysis are enabling to match patient’s tumor sequences to others to determine the best treatment to follow.

Considering the daily fight against cancer, “the power of this data network will be only as strong as it is vast,” Haussler adds.
“The bigger the pool of samples, the greater the likelihood of finding molecular matches that benefit patients,
as well as patterns that shed new light on how normal cells become malignant.”

Haussler said that patients can ask their doctors to share their genetic data in a safe mode with the Global Alliance for Genomics and Health,
which pursue to enable better sharing of genomic data and establish technical standards for this data.

Source