Guiding Cancer Treatment using Personalized Medicine

With the completion of the Human Genome Project in 2003, researchers have begun to discover the genetic and molecular roots of disease. This new information led to a new field of research aimed at personalizing medical treatment, based on the patient's genetics. In recent years, physicians have begun to combine clinical data with data from genetic testing to guide therapy. This has resulted in tailored care to improve patient outcomes, decrease side effects, and increase the effectiveness of treatment.

Because cancer has a diverse set of causes, only some of which are identified, it has been the subject of much of the interest in personalized medicine. The same type of cancer may have multiple molecular origins in different people, and the disease differs from person to person in its aggressiveness and resistance to treatments. On the pages in this site, several different types of genetic tests are discussed and compared. The application of personalized medicine to treating lung cancer (specifically, non-small cell lung cancer) and breast cancer is explained.

This webpage was created as part of a class on Clinical Medicine at the University of California, Irvine. Other websites from the class, covering a variety of topics in Clinical Medicine research and engineering, can be found here.



This image was taken from here.