New approach opens up personalised medicine for cancer treatment
10 Jun 2016
Leukaemia patients can now expect to receive treatment finely tailored to their unique condition, thanks to the most detailed map of cancer genes ever completed.
The discovery by UK scientists, hailed as the biggest breakthrough yet in the new drive for 'personalised' cancer medicine, would allow doctors to identify the exact treatment a patient needed.
This would mean thousands of patients would not need to go through unnecessary and gruelling rounds of chemotherapy, if their genes showed they were surplus to requirement.
Also other patients, fighting more deadly forms of the disease could be started on aggressive and expensive treatments.
Scientists at the Sanger Institute in Cambridgeshire yesterday announced they had charted the genes of a vicious form of blood cancer, called acute myeloid leukaemia (AML).
They uncovered that the disease was essentially 11 different disorders, and the different types could be matched to treatments with remarkable accuracy.
The team had also started applying the process for different types of cancer, and a similar study for breast cancer is expected to be published by the end of the year.
Doctors believe that personalised medicine is the most promising advance in cancer medicine since the invention of chemotherapy.
It has been estimated in a major study announced in the US last week, that personalised treatment would be six times better at treating cancer than a broad-brush approach.
With personalised treatment patients would live twice as long as before.
Professor Peter Campbell, who led the Sanger team, said, "We expect the way patients are classified will change pretty quickly on the basis of this and other studies, Reuters reported.
"One of the most amazing things is that when the patient is sitting in front of you in the clinic we will be able to say there's a very high chance of being cured with current treatments, or you've got a very low chance of being cured with current treatments and therefore we should consider these more experimental or intensive therapies."
The study, which was based on blood and bone marrow samples from 1,540 patients, was the largest of its type ever conducted.
