Cancer is Personal
What is Personalized Cancer Medicine?
Personalized or Precision cancer medicine at Mary Crowley is defined as: the process of aligning specific clinical trial options to patients, based on the genetic abnormalities found in their cancer tumor. The type of cancer a person has and how it gets treated is no longer just about where in the body the cancer started, such as in the breast or lungs or the colon.
Therefore, it is routine at Mary Crowley for each patient’s tumor tissue to undergo genomic sequencing that produces a molecular profile. With information about the molecular signals relevant to a patient’s cancer, the physician investigators can choose from available trials that specifically target those molecular signals (see Groundbreaking Research). A number of drugs are now on the market that target specific molecular signals. Many newer targeted therapies are in development and in clinical trials at Mary Crowley Cancer Research.
As a translational cancer research center, Mary Crowley has been at the forefront of personalized medicine for over 20 years. Through early phase testing of molecular-based therapies, we bridge the gap between scientific discovery and improved health outcomes for cancer patients. Translational research allows our investigators to keep one foot in the laboratory and the other in the clinical setting, pioneering the application of molecular information for each individual patient to the development of a new drug.
