Personalized Medicine
A Waste of Time?
11/08/10 15:31 Filed in: GenomeWeb Daily Scan
Blogger Robert Langreth at Forbes' Treatments observed that pharmaceutical companies have been spending a lot of money on new cancer treatments, but the results have been less than stellar, perhaps because targeted cancer treatment can't work due to the active production of more mutations in tumour cell genomes than the treatments could possibly target. S. Pelech argues that the deployment of a panel of two or three specific drugs against oncoproteins that are simultaneously overactive in the same cancer should produce a nearly 100% kill rate and effectively cure the disease if these defective proteins can be succesfully identified in biopsied specimens from a patient's tumour. Read More...
The Money of Sequencing
16/09/10 17:41 Filed in: GenomeWeb Daily Scan
Matthew Herper of Forbes noted that there has been an increasing number of cases in which people have been helped medically by knowing their genome and wonders how in the future how this will be monetized into a business. S. Pelech remarks that there have only been a few scattered reports where people have actually been helped medically by knowing their full genome, and points out that if genome sequencing is to become widely used for diagnostics, then it will have to be ultimately funded by government agencies that pay for health care or insurance companies. Read More...
It's Not a Pet
22/03/12 14:10 Filed in: GenomeWeb Daily Scan
Rebecca Boyle in Popular Science suggested that personalized mouse models might eventually be used for testing the effectiveness of drugs. The mice are implanted with tissue (e.g. tumours or blood cells) from the patient that can mimic their biology and then are used to pre-test drugs or treatments to see if they will potentially work in the patient. S. Pelech comments that immune compromised mice have also long been used for cultivation of human tumours from transplanted cancer cells, but the identification of the driver cancer mutations in the sequenced genome from the tumour of a patient is itself a very challenging task. Due to the acquisition of new mutations in growing tumours from defects in DNA repair proteins, the genetic profiles of descendant tumours in the mice could actually be quite diverse and respond differently to even the same drugs. Ultimately, an entire customized research program would be required to deliver personalized medicine as proposed by Ms. Boyle. Read More...
The Real-time In-depth-ome
16/03/12 14:35 Filed in: GenomeWeb Daily Scan
Rebecca Boyle at Popular Science reported that Michael Snyder at Stanford University has been studying his own genome, transcriptome, proteome and metabolome in an effort to make as detailed a personal 'omics profile over two years, and now the results of this study have been published in Cell. S. Pelech questions that since Dr. Snyder's academic research is primarily funded with public grant funding, is it ethical to have these resources spent in such a manner that he will be the primary beneficiary? Read More...
Well, This Is Awkward
18/04/12 13:44 Filed in: GenomeWeb Daily Scan
Mark Czarnecki at the Walrus magazine noted that while researchers have not yet nailed down their interpretations of the human genome, direct-to-consumer firms are hawking genetic tests and that offer to "detail your risks for a menu of diseases." Czarnecki stated that, "with whole-genome sequencing providing so much data that is so little understood, making the best ethical choice (of what to do) is more difficult than ever." S. Pelech cautions that the tendency of many to use the reductionist view that diseases primarily arise from defects in the genome will ultimately lead to a lot of wasted expense and unnecessary added worry. Disease arises from a complex interplay of genetic and environmental factors. Read More...