Registry Partners Project Director, Vicky Ban, attended the Pennsylvania Cancer Registrars Association 2015 Annual Conference Sept 16-18. One of the many excellent presentations at the conference was “Personalized Medicine” presented by Rebecca Crowley Jacobson, MD, MS, Chief Information Officer University of Pittsburgh Institute for Personalized Medicine, Professor of Biomedical Informatics University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. What is Personalized Medicine? Medically informed decisions based on a patient’s cancer’s unique clinical, genetic, genomic, and environmental information. Personalized medicine is about making the treatment as individualized as the disease. It’s about eliminating unnecessary diagnostics and treatments. It requires unlocking the knowledge embedded within the human genome and combining it with phenotypic data. It’s about moving discovery into practice and enabling more preventative medicine.
Targeted therapies are based on the cancer/tumor genome sequence or gene expression patterns. Other protein kinases and hormone receptors are used to target potential therapeutic agents as well.
“Personalized medicine” will play in increasing role in healthcare, particularly in cancer. Cancer genome sequencing will become an increasingly common/integral to patient care. Correlation of molecular changes to phenotype will be critical for both research and also for selecting therapy for patients. Cancer registries are likely to see increasing requirements for detail and a growing need as we learn to produce deep phenotype at scale.
Congratulations to Lori Trach! She was the winner of the Visa gift card raffled off by Registry Partners.