What once was a science fiction plotline has now come to a hospital near you: personalized medicine, or the tailoring of medical care and treatments to individuals – down to their genes.
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“What has become clear to us at U.S. News is just how mind-boggling the potential is in this arena,” said U.S. News Managing Editor Anne McGrath at the second annual Hospital of Tomorrow forum Tuesday in the nation’s capital. Equally clear, she said, “is just how incredibly challenging it’s going to be to get to where this is at the bedside.”
During a session on preparing for the age of personalized medicine, which McGrath moderated, experts with a range of insights addressed that very challenge.
Teri Manolio, director of the division of genomic medicine at NIH’s National Human Genome Research Institute, gave a brief overview of the kinds of programs that her institution is beginning to implement in the research arena that are carrying over to clinical care. Two examples include The Electronic Medical Records and Genomics Network, known as eMERGE, and Implementing Genomics in Practice, or iGNITE.
Scott T. Weiss, scientific director of Partners HealthCare Personalized Medicine, talked about what his healthcare system, which includes Massachusetts General Hospital and Brigham and Women’s Hospital, are doing related to personalized medicine. “One of the challenges for us is how we manage to move as one,” since his massive system employs about 60,000 people, including 10,000 researchers, he said.
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The system has multiple components including electronic medical records, a genomics sequencing lab and a biobank. “The key thing that we’re doing is not that we have these components…but it’s that these things were all linked together informatically -- and that’s a huge plus for us” because researchers and clinicians can move samples between the components, Weiss said. “It’s really the IT infrastructure which is key.”
The final speaker, Mark G. Kris, the chair of oncology at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, concluded by addressing how personalized medicine is used in cancer patient care. At his center, for example, researchers have genotyped about 1,000 lung cancer cases and continue to study how to use patients’ particular genetic mutations to personalize their treatments.
In one recent study led by Kris, he and a colleague were able to show that treating lung cancer patients based on the genetic driver of their cancer improved their survival by about one year. “These drivers are important to individual patients and we have technology to find them, and find them very robustly,” he said.
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