Personalized Medicine

I want to give a link to a short piece called "Personalized Medicine: Not Just a Conecpt" by Karl Schwartz, President of Patients Against Lymphoma, and published on te blog on PAL's website, Lymphomation.org.

Lymphomation is the source online for information about lymphoma, especially for the newly-diagnosed, and Karl is probably the best person to explain things to you if you need them explained. He's a gem.

Anyway, this particular blog entry focuses on the idea of personalized medicine, something I've brought up here a lot. It's the idea that science is advanced enough that we can look deeply into tissue samples and see tiny differences, so that two people with, say, Follicular NHL might actually have two very different versions of fNHL. As such, they will require and/or respond to different types of treatment.

Right now, treatment is a crap shoot. Follicular patients like me might have a choice of treatments, much like the choice I've been facing: CVP or Fludarabine. Right now, we'll go with CVP based on my age -- there are fewer potential long-term side effects with CVP than Fludarabine, and since I expect to be around for a long time, we should avoid those side effects.

But with personalized medicine, the doctor would be able to look at a sample of my cancer cells and say, "Based on what we're seeing [maybe a certain protein on the surface of the cells, or something like that], research shows that you're more likely to get a favorable response to Fludarabine than CVP. We know this because clinical trials looked at 300 samples and we've been able to figure that out your protein is a biomarker for success for Fludarabine."

The good news for me is, the new director of the Yale Cancer Center wants all patients there to have tissue samples on file, so when new discoveries come about, they'll be able to start matching people up with potentially more effective treatments. I don't know if my biopsy is automatically included, or if they'd need a new one ("Take my lymph node -- please'').

As Karl's blog entry points out, the National Cancer Institute's Biospecimen Research Network has already done a lot of work to make such a system become a reality. And Karl discusses a couple of lymphoma-related trials that have already begun making those kinds of discoveries (not for Follicular NHL, however) -- this really is becoming a reality.

As always, very cool stuff happening out there. Lots to be hopeful about.