March 07--HERSHEY -- Imagine going to your doctor and getting a diagnosis from the genetic code that is stored on your cellphone.
That may seem like something from a sci-fi movie, but scientists at Penn State's Institute for Personalized Medicine predict this scenario is only a few years in the future.
Today, scientists can take blood or tissue samples from a patient and process them so they can read their genetic code. The cost is about $5,000, but in the near future, the cost will drop to $1,000 or less, Dr. Jim Broach, director of the Penn State Institute for Personalized Medicine, told an audience of more than 300 at the Penn State Milton S. Hershey Medical Center on Wednesday night.
The institute opened its doors on the Derry
Township hospital campus in January. It's designed to help scientists research ways to improve health by using genetic and biological data and rapidly evolving computational techniques.
Broach's talk was part of this year's Mini-Medical School program. Mini-Medical School will continue at the Medical Center on Tuesday evenings through April 2, offering a series of topics for the community to learn about medical science and how it translates into clinical treatments. Broach will repeat his presentation about the Institute for Personalized Medicine at 7 p.m. March 19 at Penn State Hershey Medical Group-Camp Hill.
Broach; Dr. Glenn Gerhard, lead investigator of the institute's bio-bank program; Dr. Walter Koltun; and Dr. Xuemei Huang
discussed the potential of tailoring health care to individual patients.
"In the not-too-distant future, all of you will have your (genetic) sequence done as a routine course of your medical evaluation," Broach explained. "You'll put it on your cellphone and take it out with you, and when you go into the doctor's office that will help dictate what treatments you should have. We can define you as an individual much more precisely than we ever could before."
Broach attributed this revolution
in medicine to three things: the advent of high-speed computers; scientists' ability to determine the precise DNA sequence of individuals; and the use of electronic medical records.
"Genomics-based personalized medicine is already here," he said. "The standard of care in cancer therapeutics is personalized medicine."
For instance, Broach explained how a physician could perform a genetic sequence on tumors in cases of breast or lung cancer and melanoma to determine what has changed in a patient's cancer cells compared to their normal cells. With this data, a physician could determine what drugs might work better than others for a particular patient.
Broach said scientists have discovered the drug Zelboraf is an inhibitor of a
cancer driver called B-Raf, which is frequently implicated in malignant melanoma. In 60 percent of the patients who have the B-Raf mutation, the cancer disappeared, he said.
"It's almost a miracle treatment," he added.
Genetic sequencing also could be used to determine the best medications for a patient.
"In cystic fibrosis, there are drugs that are on the market now that will benefit certain patients with cystic fibrosis, but only if they have one particular mutation," he said.
Broach said the institute is developing a bio-repository to collect, process and store blood and tissue samples from patients who give their consent when they visit the Penn State Hershey Medical Center and its outpatient practice sites. These samples will allow scientists and physicians to develop better ways to diagnose, treat or cure certain diseases and illnesses, particularly those more prevalent in people living in central Pennsylvania.
"Our major effort is research," he said. "What we're trying to do is find new bio-markers that predict disease susceptibility and responses to treatment. Once we do that, we can translate that information from our research lab into clinical tests."
Gerhard talked about what researchers are learning about gene mutations and how best to inform patients of their genetic makeup. The institute has set up an internal ethics advisory board to study the best ways to inform patients of their genetic information.
Koltun and Huang spoke about how genetic data is being used to diagnose inflammatory bowel disease, Parkinson's disease and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as Lou Gehrig's disease.
"The personalized medicine concept is not just being applied to pills and how you want to treat cancer," Koltun said. "It's also being applied to what surgical procedures you should undergo and what your outcomes with certain surgical procedures are going to be as a consequence of your genetic makeup."
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