Treating Cancer Patients Differently

Scott: You talked about cancer, as well, a little bit earlier. It's another disease that continues to be a major issue. Where are we now in at least the learning process of how to fight that?

Prof. Garth Nicolson: Well, I think we're doing much better with cancer in terms of its therapy, because we've taken an approach which looks at subsets of particular cancers and identifies them as whether they're genetically driven or environmentally driven, primarily. We can now tailor treatments for those specific patients. That's where it's all headed. I think in the future we'll have very unique therapies for individual patients that are much more successful than we've ever seen before because, in the past, therapies were developed in a more general sense. Pools of patients that had a given diagnostic handle, more or less, were given the same type of therapy and comparative controls. Now we know, if you look at subsets of those patients, some do very well on this particular therapy, and others don't do well at all. Now, we're trying to subset out these patients to identify, in advance, patients that might do well with a particular type of therapy and treat those patients differently.

Scott: Mm-hmm.