scifiknitter

Seen in a lung cancer foundation’s chatroom recently: A: I wish I had a mutation. B: I’ve got one. If you want it, you can have it. This is something we don’t talk about in the lung cancer community, at least not out loud: that we might be envious of someone else’s cancer mutation. While personalized medicine is still an ideal rather than a reality, some lung cancer patients find themselves on the frontier of a different approach to medicine, one where each person’s treatment is based on her or his disease’s genetic profile. in 2003, a medicine called gefitinib was approved by the FDA for treating lung cancer in all patients who had had chemotherapy. After additional research, this approval was rescinded in 2005, because the drug did not extend life over the population of patients as a whole. Doctors noticed, however, that the medication helped a minority of patients a lot, even as it didn’t help other patients at all. When researchers investigated why this was so, the...