Some of the pharmacology of cancer block focused on "targeted therapies" with drugs like imatinib which specifically targets the abnormal tyrosine kinase in chronic myelogenous leukemia (CML). Like monoclonal antibody therapies and other drugs specifically designed to inhibit a target, these drugs are highly efficacious with few side effects. Conventional cancer chemotherapy is a brute force approach, and its serious side effects are a result of its nonspecificity. The other aspect of personalized medicine is pharmacogenetics, where a person's genotype affects response to medication. For example, mutations in different enzymes can change the rate at which a person metabolizes specific drugs.
Anyway, I wanted to write a post about pharmacogenomics because it's often hailed as the next big thing in medicine. It's like testing the susceptibility of a microbe to antibiotics; you know which drugs will work best, maximizing efficacy and minimizing toxicity. I actually think this stuff is really cool and might be clinically feasible. Microarrays are a brilliant high-throughput technology, and the great hope with clinical microarrays is that we can quickly assay a patient's genotype or a cancer's profile to predict prognosis and direct treatment with more and more specificity. So although the lectures were pretty dry, I feel like this is a really cool and exciting budding field.
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