Future Now
The IFTF Blog
Using Genetics to Customize Cancer Treatments
Massachusetts General Hospital is planning to use genetic testing to personalize its treatment for all of its cancer patients within the year, apparently making it the first hospital in the country to use genetic testing as a standard part of cancer treatment. According to the Boston Globe, the hospital will use robots and automated machines to scan as many as 6,000 patient tumors for 13 "major cancer genes" and 110 abnormalities with the hope that the scans will help doctors tailor treatments to match the underlying genetics of the tumor.
As the Globe notes, the treatment could signal the beginning of a long-anticipated shift toward developing personalized treatments based on genetics:
Routine tumor screening, which began with lung cancer patients this week, opens a window onto the frontier of cancer medicine, where doctors focus more on the genetic profile of a tumor and less on whether it's in the lung, breast, or prostate. The genes that reside inside the malignancy may prove vastly more important than its address.
The testing could be especially helpful to patients with rare tumors, cancers that stoke little interest among researchers or drug companies. That is because they may share genetic signatures with more common tumors already being successfully treated.
MGH doctors caution against getting too optimistic about the screenings, even as they maintain hope for the future use of the tests.
And as with many efforts to expand personalized treatments, it's not yet clear who will pay for their early adoption. The hospital plans to charge approximately $2,000 for the genetic tests, though at least initially, money may come from insurers, the hospital or patients, depending on the case.