DNA Quote of the Day: Dr. Sharon Krag

by Dr. Hsien-Hsien Lei
Posted July 13, 2007 in DNA Quotes and Excerpts

Dr. Sharon Krag (yay!), who was on my dissertation committee, in the Johns Hopkins Public Health Magazine feature, The Genetic Journey:

In the next few years, you’ll go to the doctor, and the doctor will say, ‘Sharon, you have a cancer. And we know which specific genes are mutated. We can successfully treat your cancer specifically using this approach.’ Treatments once relied on information about tissues and cells, but they are now based on which genes are mutated. That’s what is exciting. And that is what personalized medicine means.

Tags: personalized medicine, genetics, genes, dna, sharon krag, genome, genomics, cancer

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2 Comments »

Comment by David Bradley

2007-07-13 15:29:20

“In the next few years”? Is that five, ten, fifteen? I’m always wary of generic claims of medical breakthroughs on some unspecified timescale. Certainly, there will be genetic testing for specific mutations some time soon, but will the therapeutics have caught up with the analytics by then?

db

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Comment by Hsien

2007-07-13 17:19:49

Actually, there are personalized medicines already available, i.e., warfarin (blood thinner) doses can be more precisely determined depending on a person’s genotype and tamoxifen may prevent cancer in some BRCA mutation carriers.

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