Alivia Ankrum
BIOI 2000
Reading 1 Summary
The initial article published by the New England Journal of Medicine begins with the
announcement of President Obama’s new “Precision Medicine Initiative”, which is composed of
two components: one focused on a near-term goal of using precision medicine to focus on
cancers, and a long term goal to apply preventative measures and treatment methods to a wide
range of health and disease that concerns the human population. Cancer is the obvious first
priority because it is one of the leading causes of death worldwide, and more relevantly,
genetic variations contribute to a cancer risk in patients. Although, to understand more about
cancer there must be development of new tools, to which Obama’s initiative will contribute,
such as more clinical designs with different models, more reliable methods for preclinical
testing, and building a digital storage base for the resulting molecular and medical data in order
to more efficiently deliver it to all parties involved. Long term, pursuing more advanced
research ideas will hopefully allow for prediction methods for many diseases that affect the
human population. In the future, hopes for many Americans willing to volunteer themselves
and their medical data to further the understanding of how we can administer different drug
therapies to benefit people using pharmacogenomics.
Prior to this publication, The American Cancer Society released a three-part series
explaining different areas of cancer research. The underlying concept it emphasizes is that the
new knowledge about specific molecular and genetic components of how a tumor works in
each unique patient’s system is the new standard to treating cancer. Tailoring treatments as
well as prevention strategies to the characteristics of each patient is the new standard of
patient care. Although, cancer can arise from many different mutations, which has caused the
arise of targeted therapy, or rather, customized treatment for patients that isn’t just one
specific protocol that is followed for every cancer patient. A scientist is even using fruit flies to
mimic the genetic mutations seen in patients. Dr. Cagan breeds multiple fruit flies with the
same mutation as the patient, and tests the wide variety of cancer drugs he has in his library
against the cancer cells developing, and once one combination works, he sends it to the
physician on the case.
From all of this, a distant goal is to use big data and artificial intelligence to start
predicting responses to different treatments. But of course, there are not challenges that will
need to be faced, such as each treatment cannot necessarily be helpful for another patient, or
insurance companies might not cover treatments unless the proper number of clinical trials
have been completed.
In my personal opinion, as it stood 5 years ago, precision medicine should be the
standard of care for every practice worldwide. Analyzing genomic data is the key to improving
the health of people worldwide. The only shortcoming that I can personally think of currently is
the lack of people interested in STEM, or a mix of computer science and biology. I feel as
though it takes a certain kind of brain to understand both how a computer works and how a
body works.