Personalization

A few weeks ago, I posted a video of three NHL researchers discussing current and future treatments for lymphomas. The future, they said, was that treatments in 5 or 10 years would be "personalized," with doctors able to find out which treatments will work for each individual patient.

There's a really nice press release out of UCLA that touts just this kind of thing. It's called "UCLA scientists develop 'crystal ball' for personalized cancer treatment."

Here's the deal: researchers are looking for alternatives to chemotherapy. Chemo often works, but leaves toxic side effects. Worse-- sometimes it doesn't work, wasting time and money, and still leaving the toxic side effects. When it doesn't work, it's because the patient's individual biochemical makeup just doesn't match up with the drugs for whatver reason. The UCLA researchers seem to have found a way to predict if a treatment will work before it's given.

They altered a chemotherapy drug so that it could be traced with a PET scan, creating a "tag" that would show up on the PET. They gave the drug to mice with leukemia and lymphoma, then gave them a PET. The PET allowed them to see the tagged drug being absorbed by the tumor.

The researchers think that this will work on humans, too; they'll be able to give a small amount of a tagged drug to cancer patients and then see on a PET whether or not it was being absorbed by the tumor. If it isn't being absorbed, they know the chemo won't work, and they'll try a different treatment. That's one kind of "personalization" that we can look forward to in the near future.

They hope to begin clinical trials at some point; phase I will determine if the therapy is harmful, phase 2 and 3 will determine if it actually works.

So the future is now. Very cool stuff.