Air Force veteran Charles Fitch is alive today, most likely because of “personalized” cancer treatment that used to be the stuff of science fiction, all thanks to cancer research and treatment based on genomics.
In regards to medicine, genomics basically refers to the analysis of a individual’s complete set of DNA, or genome, and how to treat diseases based on the mutations or other changes that have occurred to genes in the sequence.
Fitch, a 53-year-old grandfather who lives in Mount Pleasant, was diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia in June 2011, a few weeks after he started having chest pains. Lab results showed that he had a low, and later plummeting, level of platelets in his blood.
This is quite fascinating to me. The article mentions several discoveries which I already knew about as the time to get a basic research discovery to the clinic with an improved treatment option is over a decade. Wish they could speed up the process of getting new treatments into the clinic. Now, it seems the FDA does everything in its power to slow down the process so new treatments are not available as quickly. sigh….