Reflecting on the recent/heated “hype vs. hope” precision oncology debates: It’s not “vs.” → real hope it engenders & current limitations are simultaneously true. This tension mirrors so much of oncology, as @Bob_Wachter elegantly points out here:
nytimes.com/2018/04/19/opi… [1/n]
nytimes.com/2018/04/19/opi… [1/n]
Thankfully, @DHymanMD captured this critical point clearly, here:
A recent 'back of the envelope' study noted only ~15% (~95k) metastatic cancer patients may get genome-informed Rx in 2018, & less achieve clinical benefit:
jamanetwork.com/journals/jamao…
But that same study indicates steady progress (see below from sciencemag.org/news/2018/04/c…)
jamanetwork.com/journals/jamao…
But that same study indicates steady progress (see below from sciencemag.org/news/2018/04/c…)
I started oncology fellowship in 2010, & had to fight to get genome-informed Rx for my 1st BRAF-mutant melanoma patient pre-approval. Back then, the only choice was chemo (5% response rate) & genome-informed Rx response rate approached 0%. No cure then, but real clinical benefit.
It seems a sometimes forgotten point that, in context of typical pace of translational biomedicine, we've come so far so quickly - from ~0 to 95,000 people/lives/stories per year! It's still messy, of course, and there is much to learn.
So here's to the many brilliant scientists, doctors, and patients doing the actual hard work (living with cancer, running clinical trials, working in the lab, etc.), day and night, to make sense of precision cancer medicine 🍻 [fin]
