Early Detection Testing
Early detection will continue based on large population risk. This is also referred to as
screening (e.g., mammograms, colonoscopies). The hope is that new tools will enable
screening to be more accurate and to find disease earlier than today's tools.
Risk Assessment: New forms of assessment will be incorporated (e.g., determining
which people carry the genetic variation that increases their risk for developing cancer).
Prevention: Though true prevention must occur before disease symptoms are
present, better risk assessment enables people to make life choices that may decrease
their risk for developing disease.
Targeted Monitoring: (e.g., women with the genetic variation in BRCA1&2 genes
should have more frequent mammograms).
Diagnosis
Today, diagnosis is clinical/symptom-driven. The new paradigm will add molecular
monitoring to the equation, which may identify disease subtypes that cannot now be
clinically determined. New molecular tools may also provide doctors with information on
prognosis (disease outcome), which will help them make better treatment decisions with
their patients.
Therapy
New molecular tools may also provide doctors with information on which drug their
patients may respond to. People will fall into smaller and smaller sub-groups depending
on their molecular profiles. Pharmacogenomics is also playing a role in this by
finding groups of responders and non-responders to specific drugs (more about this
later).
Also, the hope is that more cancers can be treated with a targeted therapy that spares
healthy cells and only kills cancer cells. This may lead to a much higher quality of life due
to fewer side effects, better survival outcomes and perhaps even fewer secondary
illnesses caused by the initial treatment.
Response Monitoring
One goal of personalized medicine is to identify genetic variations or mutations as well as
changes in gene or protein expression that can be linked to a response to a medical
intervention.
The pharmaceutical industry is good at developing new drugs with the ability to kill
cancer cells; but, often, when these are administered to a patient, there is an initially
positive response until the cancer mutates and evolves in an effort to establish a way to
overcome the effects of the therapy.
To truly wipe out cancer cells within the body, it is not enough to have effective drugs
that target some of the cancer-growth pathways, it is also essential to have a way of
monitoring the cancer itself, so the drug therapy can be adjusted to match the tumor as it
evolves. In this way, it might be possible to use a sequence of treatments to allow a better
outcome for the patient.
It's All About You
It's important to remember that personalized medicine is not solely about 'omics'.
Personalized medicine is about you, the health consumer. People vary from one another
in many ways - what they eat, the life style choices they make, the types and amount of
stress they experience, exposure to environmental factors, and their DNA. Many of these
variations play a role in health and disease.
People also have different cultural experiences and values-these all should be included in
your medical teams decision-making process.
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| Image provided by CISN archives. All rights reserved. |
Personalized medicine also allows your health care provider, such as your physician, to
focus his/her attention on what makes you "you", instead of abiding by generalities.
