As Digital Journal has previously reported, U.S. President Obama has requested $215 million infunding in order to launch his push for personalized clinical care. This means medicines tailor made for individual patients. Obama uses the term term “precision medicine”; however what is at stake is more often called “personalized medicine” within the healthcare community.
Outlining what personalized medicine means, Digital Journal explained in a recent feature: “Personalized medicine proposes the customization of healthcare. This means medical decisions, practices, and drug products being tailored to the individual patient. So rather than condition x needing drug y, diagnostic testing would be used to select the appropriate therapy for an individual person based on that person’s unique genetic make-up and physical characteristics.”
Although personalized medicine remains a tangible goal, one area of therapy seems to be a no-go. For patients with pancreatic cancer, the wait for a personalized treatment based on genomic data may be too long to be practical, according to a recent study.
The study was led by Andrew Biankin, director of the Wolfson Wohl Cancer Research Centre at the University of Glasgow. As part of a small clinical study, Biankin and his research team attempted to offer pancreatic cancer patients personalized therapies by sequencing their tumors in search of a variety of genetic alterations that would dictate an appropriate drug. The concept was seen as of great importance for outlooks for these patients are particularly bleak: 95 percent die within five years of diagnosis.
However, time proved to a major limitation for Biankin’s research. Although Biankin’s team received the genetic results three weeks after obtaining consent from patients, none of the consenting patients eligible for personalized treatments were available to complete the study. Among the 22 patients who had a positive hit on the genetic screen, six had died, others had medical complications arise, and a few withdrew from the study.
These complications and other related matters are discussed in the journal Clinical Cancer Research. The article is titled “Precision Medicine for Advanced Pancreas Cancer: The Individualized Molecular Pancreatic Cancer Therapy (IMPaCT) Trial.”
