Cancer > Understanding Risks to Tailor Treatment

Understanding Risks to Tailor Treatment

By Alison Caldwell, Ph.D. Photography by Tom Boggan

The pace of radiopharmaceutical development is accelerating — and with it comes the pace of research to better understand the impacts of the technology and where to best apply it. Not every patient is the right candidate for every treatment. While chemotherapy and traditional radiation approaches may lead to complete remission in one patient, another may need the power of something such as radiopharmaceuticals. And, like any treatment, theranostics can have unwanted side effects.

This is truly personalized medicine. It’s so amazing to think that we could directly predict your risk versus my risk of developing these complications based on our genetics.

Hematologist Yael Kusne, M.D., Ph.D., is working on understanding how a person’s individual genetic profile may make them more susceptible to serious side effects of cancer therapies like radiopharmaceuticals. She’s studying how radiopharmaceutical treatment impacts the rate of genetic mutations in blood stem cells. The hope is to identify particular genetic variants that may put the patient at risk of developing leukemia down the road.

“I think this is the future of medicine in general,” Dr. Kusne says. “We’ll be able to take patient samples into the lab and use them to determine the best treatment options for targeting the cancer and reducing potential side effects.”

In the future, she says, we’ll be able to put information about a person’s genetic makeup into a computer algorithm, along with their cancer history and tumor type. The results will aid clinicians and patients in making tailored treatment decisions that will be the most effective and efficient on an individual level.

“This is truly personalized medicine,” Dr. Kusne says. “It’s so amazing to think that we could directly predict your risk versus my risk of developing these complications based on our genetics.”