• Question: Are tailored therapies/personalised treatments likely to become widely used treatments? How would they work?

    Asked by to Amy, Anita, Daryl, Nimesh, Sandra on 25 Jun 2014. This question was also asked by .
    • Photo: Amy Monaghan

      Amy Monaghan answered on 25 Jun 2014:

      Hey Hannahgrimes

      I think as genome sequencing becomes cheaper then personalised therapies are definitely likely to become a mainstay of drug treatment. Certain drugs such as warfarin which thins your blood and is used to prevent your risk of getting clots is very heavily influenced by different genes and some specialist clinics are already changing their practice to tailor dosage to different ways people metabolise the drug. It’s also important to know for certain drugs such as beta blockers or codeine whether the drug is going to be effective at all – some people just don’t have the enzymes!!

      More than this though, I think using stem cells from a person’s own blood or bone marrow is going to be the most likely way personal medicine is used in the future. Using these cells and engineering them to be healthy, then re-transplanting them could be a way of improving many conditions, including neurodegenerative disorders, diabetes and heart attacks, by using cells from your own body! Maybe one day we’ll also be able to create blood or whole organs from these cells, meaning you no longer have to wait for an organ transplant if you need one – but that could take a very long time and there will be lots of ethical issues I’m sure!

    • Photo: Anita Thomas

      Anita Thomas answered on 25 Jun 2014:

      Personalised treatments are having a bit of an upsurge now, as a result of genomic analysis. I know of 1 group who are using a massively big study on the genetic makeup of people with platelet disorders to personalise their patient treatments. Platelets are a very small cell particle in blood that is involved in clotting. If the platelets lack a receptor for a protein, or have too many granules containing clotting factors………..well, you get the picture!

    • Photo: Daryl Jones

      Daryl Jones answered on 25 Jun 2014:

      Hi hannahgrimes

      Well you’ll be surprised to know that we are already doing this at Mayo Clinic!
      We sequence the whole genome of a patient (find out what variation in genes that person has) and then we can use this information to work out how best to treat a patient.

      For example, if the patient was getting breast, knowing what genes are involved in this persons breast cancer means that we can use a different and more appropriate treatment to someone who has breast cancer but with different genes involved.

      Also, we are taking cells from peoples skin, making them into stem cells, and then putting them back into the same person where they came from, as a sort of way to replace lost and “broken” cells…in the brain for example!

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