Personalized Medicine
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Increasingly, doctors can custom-tailor therapies for a wide range of disease, based upon the individual genetic makeup of a patient.
Aired March 10, 2008
2 minutes (2.5 MB) | Download mp3
Transcript
Medicine today is entering a new era where therapies will be based on a patient’s personal genetic information. From the University of Kansas, this is Research Matters. I’m Brendan Lynch.
After obtaining his doctorate from the University of Kansas, Randy Scott began a career as a successful bio-entrepreneur. Today, he is chairman and CEO of Genomic Health, a biotech firm in California that helps customize therapies for cancer patients.
Randy Scott: "Our interest is in developing diagnostics that will help to identify patients with cancer, which patients are most likely to recur and which patients are most likely to benefit from therapies like chemotherapy, which is a tremendous problem in healthcare today is understanding which patients are going to benefit from which drugs and exactly how should we treat people once they’ve been diagnosed."
Using the new technology of genomics and the work coming out of the human genome project, Scott’s company examines patients' genes to see how they correlate with certain diseases and therapies.
Randy Scott: "We work with standard breast cancer patients and breast cancer samples to help women who are diagnosed with early stage breast cancer where most women do extremely well. But a very small number of women will go on to recur and could have invasive, life-threatening breast caner. We work with these patients to receive their samples upon a physician’s prescription and then we’ll analyze 21 genes.
With this better understanding at the molecular level, Scott says some women diagnosed with breast cancer could avoid unnecessary chemotherapy. Indeed, this genomic approach to medicine is becoming more widespread.
Randy Scott: "We believe that we're entering a whole new era of personalized medicine in which genomic information about the underlying genetic make up of the patient and the specific biology of their disease is going be a very new powerful set of information to help identify both the prognosis about the patient -- how well they are likely to do, how bad their likely course of disease is going to be. But just as important, which patients are going to respond to which drugs?
For more about personalized medicine based on genomic information, log on to Research Matters dot K-U dot E-D-U. For the University of Kansas, I’m Brendan Lynch.
Tell Me More
KU Bioentrepreneurship Symposium Feb. 9 to feature prominent alumnus
A symposium designed to introduce KU students to bioscience entrepreneurship is scheduled for Sat., Feb. 9, from 10:30 a.m. to 3 p.m. at the KU Alumni Center. The event is free, includes lunch and is open to students in any academic field who have an interest in entrepreneurship.
