Personalized Medicine @ Yale

This morning's New Haven Register has a story about the relatively new Yale Center for Genome Analysis, housed at the relatively new Yale Cancer Center. Fascinating article (and video).

The Genome Center looks at samples of cancer cells to get a look at the genes in the cell, to determine which parts of the gene are messed up. Follicular NHL, for example, has its own mess-up: I think it's that chromosomes 14 and 17 are switched. I forget exactly. That kind of thing involves numbers, and you know how I feel about numbers and my cancer.

I don't need to understand all that, because these good folks at Yale understand it. I was amazed at some of the things they said in the article -- like about the cost of doing this kind of analysis: “The cost of sequencing DNA has come down by more than five orders of magnitude in the last 10 years, so that rather than costing $100,000 to sequence a million bases of DNA, it now costs 25 cents ... and the cost is going to continue to plummet." Continue to plummet? How much farther can it plummet from a quarter, for cryin' out loud?

Not that I'm complaining. I know the new director of the Yale Cancer Center has made it a priority to make sure that all cancer patients at their hospital have a biopsy on file that can undergo this analysis, for the time when their particular cancer can be treated based on molecular analysis. This is, in my humble opinion, the future of cancer research -- examining the particulars of a cancer cell and determining treatment based on what's found. That kind of thing is already happening, and the intense gene-level focus should mean treatments that are less toxic because they can hit just the cancer cells.

So, once again, I have to say thanks to Yale (for their state-of-the-art cancer hospital; I've already said thank to them for their great art museum, awesome natural history museum, and cool hockey arena). I like that they're about 15 minutes away from me, in case their services should prove useful. Not that I'm in a hurry....