Treatments or drug therapy can sometimes take a one-size-fits-all approach.
A person has a certain disease, and they get generally the same dose of medication everyone with that disease gets.
“We study those drugs in a large population of patients, and we take sort of the average of how effective it is, as well as how safe it is, and we use that therapy and that dosing in general to treat all patients,” said Lisa Holle is a professor at the UW– Madison School of Pharmacy and clinical oncology pharmacist at the UW-Madison Carbone Cancer Center. “But what we know now is that individual characteristics of a patient may help us tailor the medication so that it's more effective or safer or both.”
That’s where precision medicine comes in.
The first one of its kind for cancer was approved in the late 90s with dozens more since then.
One approved in the early 2000s was imatinib which was used to treat chronic myelogenous leukemia or CML.
Holle says before the only treatment for the deadly cancer was a type of bone marrow transplant that came with its own life-threatening risks.
“That drug has revolutionized the treatment of CML,” said Holle. “Those patients now are living decades on an orally administered drug, and they don't have to necessarily undergo a bone marrow transplant.”
Holle will be talking about precision medicine at this week’s Science on Tap Minocqua.
“We're thinking about precision medicine and evaluating it. There are areas outside of cancer where it plays a role,” said Holle. “I want to talk about where we're going with this and what this might look like in the future, and how what we learn about cancer will help inform how we treat other diseases.”
Science on Tap Minocqua is Thursday, October 1 at 6:30 p.m. at Rocky Reef Brewing Company.
It will also be streamed online.
A note to listeners WXPR is a sponsor for Science on Tap Minocqua.
