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You probably haven’t heard about precision medicine. That’s fine, it wasn’t even possible ten years ago.
But now we’re entering the new Gilded Age — and suddenly researchers are using it to fight many deadly diseases, including brain cancer in kids.
Scientists at Dana Farber, a Harvard-affiliated research group, and the Boston Children’s Blood Disorders and Cancer Center, recently sequenced tumor samples from 200 children with brain cancer, Forbes reported.
What they found was astounding: More than half the children exhibited genetic abnormalities that could influence how the disease was treated.
“The reason we did this trial was that brain tumors are a leading cause of death in children, and the treatments that we and everyone else use are decades old – radiation and chemo,” writes Pratiti Bandopadhayay, a pediatric neuro-oncologist at Dana-Farber/Boston Children’s in the medical journal Neuro-Oncology. “Our approach to try to improve on that is to target the individual tumors of each child.”
That’s the key. Precision medicine promises to change health sciences by using data analytics and what we know about ourselves to tailor personal therapies and treatments.
In this way, precision medicine is the perfect symbol of the New Gilded Age. It grew out of the awesome advances in cloud computing. It touched medicine and changed what researchers thought to be possible. Without that, neither genome sequencing nor bespoke drug discovery would be possible. Certainly it would not have been possible for doctors to dream about developing treatments based on the patient’s individual biology.
In theory, it all seems simple enough, even logical. Getting to this point has been a bit more complex.
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It started with the sequencing of the human genome. At an initial cost of $3 billion and 13 long years of research, the outlay of monetary and human capital was extreme. Yet the project was bountiful. It allowed scientists to learn about illness at the cellular level, determine what precisely went wrong, and — at least in theory — determine a treatment for the mutation.
For example, most patients currently diagnosed with cancer undergo a battery of oncology tests and usually end up with chemotherapy. That one-size-fits-all treatment carpet bombs everything, killing good and bad cells indiscriminately.
Precision medicine is more of a smart bomb. Doctors locate the mutation at the cellular level, find the specific drug treatment to correct the abnormality. Then they calibrate the dosage based on personal genetics.
The theory is great, and there has been a lot of promising work. The only holdback is cost.
Technology is helping. Today, powerful cloud-based computers using advanced algorithms can sequence the human genome in less than a week for as little as a few thousand dollars. Soon it will be within the realm of possibility to screen every patient.
And it won’t end with genes. Scientists are analyzing the microbes on us and in our gut, environmental factors and even our diets to tailor treatments for illness that meet our individual needs.
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Sensor data from wearables like FitBit, smartwatches and phones will help, too. It will be true personalized medicine.
In January 2015, President Obama announced he would be adding $215 million to his annual budget for a comprehensive precision medicine plan. The National Institutes of Health will help build a 1 million volunteer sample group to draw more data; its National Cancer Institute will research the genomic drivers of cancer; the Food and Drug Administration will develop new testing techniques to expedite the drug approval process; and a consortium of privacy groups is being consulted to maintain strict privacy standards.
More recently, 21 Chinese hospitals reached an agreement to use IBM’s cognitive platform Watson for Oncology to help tailor personalized, precision medicine. Cancer is the leading cause of death in China. In 2015, more than 4.3 million people were diagnosed and 2.8 million died. Watson for Oncology draws data from 300 medical journals, 200 textbooks and more than 15 million pages of text and peer-reviewed work to make recommendations.
It also has a working relationship with the world renowned, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York.
In 2013, the center made news when a breast cancer patient, who had been battling the disease for the better part of 30 years, made remarkable progress following an experimental precision medicine treatment developed by AstraZeneca.
Tumors, which had become visible on her skull and face, completely receded.
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Pharmaceutical companies are gearing up. In 2015, Roche promised as much as $1 billion to Blueprint Medicines for five small molecule projects in development. Then, in January 2016, Roche announced it would spend more than $1 billion on a 56% stake in Foundation Medicine, a molecular and genomic diagnostic company. Illumina, another diagnostic service provider, has formed similar alliances with Germany’s Merck KGaA , AstraZeneca and Sanofi.
Each of us is unique, a product of our own chemistry and environmental factors. It makes sense to build healthcare treatments tailored to that uniqueness. Ultimately it could be less costly and more effective.
Until recently, it was impossible. Cloud-computing advances in the New Gilded Age are changing everything.
These medical advances offer many exciting investment opportunities. To take advantage of these opportunities, you need to take a lot of time to scout for them and research them – like I do for members of my services – Pivotal Point Trader and Tech Trend Trader.
Best wishes,
Jon Markman
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This gilded age is going to tarnish very quickly. Cancer is a metabolic disease not a result of genetic mutation. Damaged mitochondria cause genetic mutations, not the other way around. The drug company/government medical research monopoly ignore the work of Thomas Seifryfried PhD at Boston College and other researchers who are brave enough to go where the actual experimental results take them. The NIH and the drug companies are going down a dead end in hopes of making profits at the expense of much unnecessary pain and suffering and death.
at least science has acknowledged that everyone of us is unique. The only way we can be unique instead of replicated copies such as the lower mammals is by having been created. Thanks. As for your treatments, in the wrong and unethical hands it would produce chimeric nightmares. No thanks. The Chinese are going through was we did 50 years ago and are finding out that cancer and other internal ailments are the result of what is ingested into the body and not how the body was built to begin with.
Paranumre, do you stay awake at night dreaming up your personal brand of science, along with exotic industrial conspiracies? One seldom sees so much nonsense in a single paragraph.
How do you explain away the ability of genetic screening to predict breast and brain cancer with remarkable degrees of accuracy, and at the same time deny the rapidly approaching ability to gene-splice with extreme precision to STOP the genetic predisposition to specific forms of cancer? Please note that the motives of the NIH and big pharma are anything but your conspiratorial slander.
I completely agree with the message from WORMHALL that genetic considerations for cancer detection are based on sound scientific studies. The abnormalities associated with the BRAC a1c gene are very well known. Certainly Angelina Jolle was completely convinced. It’s prudent to be suspicious of any potential “follow the money” considerations in big businesses but I guess this person sees a boogyman behind every door.