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Cancer doctors customize treatment through genetic screening
Massachusetts attorney Thomas M. Kiley, http://www.tomkileylaw.com, concentrates on legal problems regarding health issues. A recent article in the Boston Globe describes a new approach by cancer doctors to use a patient’s genetic fingerprints to customize new treatment strategies. According to the article, Massachusetts General Hospital may be the first hospital in the US to make gene testing a part of cancer treatment.
Under this new treatment plan, doctors will use robots and lab machines nicknamed John, Paul, George, and Ringo to hunt for 110 abnormalities carried on 13 major cancer genes, that can predict which drugs to use as treatment. The robots can identify genetic characteristics in 5-6,000 patients a year faster than the time-consuming techniques used previously.
This new strategy was implemented last week with lung cancer patients allowing doctors to concentrate on the genetic profile of tumors rather than on whether the tumor is in the lung, breast, or prostate. They feel the genes inside the tumors will help doctors develop a treatment strategy, especially for patients with rare tumors.
Anna Barker, deputy director of the National Cancer Institute, said this new strategy is a form of personalized medicine that leads doctors to prescribe particular drugs rather than trying out different types of drugs to see which one will work. There are still doctors that caution against putting too much hope in any one technique to cure cancer. They said sometimes tumors can have so many genetic abnormalities that no one test or drug is enough.
Mass. General says they will charge $2,000 a test and will ask health care insurers to pay for the testing as part of the basic care of health care plans. Representatives of three of Massachusetts’ major health plan providers are not convinced they should cover genetic testing.
Researchers have found particular genetic imprints in breast cancer patients, as well as lung tumors. Then researchers discovered that the same abnormal genes found in certain breast and lung tumors can also exist in other tumor types. These findings convinced Mass. General doctors to develop a plan toward universal screening.
Scientists worked with robots and developed processes so that in seven hours, samples from 96 patients can undergo a process reducing the cancer tissue to its most important constituent parts so genes can be easily read.
According to the article, another hospital Dana-Farber, performs gene testing on certain patients because doctors know some malignancies can carry abnormalities that are susceptible to certain drugs. At Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York most patients with lung cancer will have their tumors genetically analyzed. Dr. Marc Ladanyi, chief of Sloan-Kettering’s Molecular Diagnostics Service, said genetic screening during a visit to the oncologist will soon be as commonplace as tests performed during an annual physical, like a blood test.
For more information about Mass. General’s Cancer Treatment Center and the new genetic screening program to customize new cancer treatment strategies, go to http://www.massgeneral.org/Cancer/.
