Pharmacogenetics may have new cure for cancer: Academic

Press TV has conducted an interview with Roger Von Hawnher, a professor at the John Hopkins University in New York, to discuss a new study launched by American scientist, seeking to find targeted therapies for cancers based on genetic mutations.

What follows is a rough transcription.

Press TV: Even though it is in its early clinical trials, how revolutionary is this going to be in the way cancer treatments are approached?

Von Hanwher: Pharmacogenetics is a field [that] has been around for at least 20 years. The basic principle of the uniqueness of a tumor and its mutational structure has been a hypothesis that has had a varying degree of support. It is quite sustainable as a hypothesis for lymphoma and leukemia. It is somewhat more difficult to prove an absolute correlation between mutation and the proteins expressed by tumor, for solid-state tumors such as breast cancer, ovarian cancer, and lung cancer across large groups of patients. However the possibility of doing this was triggered and the interest was shown when methods were developed ten years ago for taking biopsy samples of a patient’s tumor and subjecting them to different combinations of chemotherapeutic agents in the lab to determine the best cocktail of chemotherapeutic agents for a given patient. That was shown to be very effective but cumbersome and was not applied at a mass scale on a clinical level. Now the attempt by the [National Institutes of Health] NIH and the [National Cancer Institute] NCI is to automate genetic screening to attempt and predict which chemotherapeutic agents will work at a genetic, or at a transcription level where DNA information is converted to RNA and then to proteins with regard to mimicking what is happening in the cancer cell.

Press TV: You used the term cumbersome; I just want to ask how practical will it be to deploy these techniques en masse, for each individual, where each cure is basically customized to each patient’s needs?

Von Hanwher: Well, in the past doing it on the basis of cell culture subjected to chemotherapeutic agents was very cumbersome; now with automated genetic screening technologies it is going to be much more facile and much more rapid to define a given mutation and suggest its correlation to a given cocktail of chemotherapeutic agents. However, the correlation I wish to emphasize is the correlation between a genetic mutation and the ultimate behavior of a population of cancer cells in a given patient is not as effectively established as the a priori examination of how the cells behave when actually exposed to the chemotherapeutic agent in the lab, prior to treatment by that patient and that part of the process is quite cumbersome.

Press TV: Right, so for those who are going to be following this, how long before we know for sure?

Von Hanwher: Well, such a study and a the matter of analysis will generally take at least one to two years and then we will know if such mutational changes and patterns among the human population that has cancer can be correlated with a given responsiveness to chemotherapeutic agents. It will however take much longer, maybe another three to five years beyond that, to see whether this method of therapy really alters outcome and long-term survival in different types of cancer. 

MTM/KA

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