Gina Kolata at the NYTimes has two recent pieces on the limits — let’s say “failure” — of much-touted personalized medicine.
No comment on the page itself and not much on Twitter, blogs, etc… (7/20 update: See Gooz News.)
We wonder. Mass General has been promoting their research in this area. (Here’s a story from the Sunday Times (UK) about successes at MGH. The story just won an award from an doctor’s group.) We don’t usually ask for comments on other people’s stories but we’ll check in with them.
Here is a story and an “analysis”.
July 8, 2011
How Bright Promise in Cancer Testing Fell Apart
By GINA KOLATA
CORRECTION APPENDED
When Juliet Jacobs found out she had lung cancer, she was terrified, but realized that her hope lay in getting the best treatment medicine could offer. So she got a second opinion, then a third. In February of 2010, she ended up at Duke University, where she entered a research study whose promise seemed stunning.
Doctors would assess her tumor cells, looking for gene patterns that would determine which drugs would best attack her particular cancer. She would not waste precious time with ineffective drugs or trial-and-error treatment. The Duke program — considered a breakthrough at the time — was the first fruit of the new genomics, a way of letting a cancer cell’s own genes reveal the cancer’s weaknesses.
But the research at Duke turned out to be wrong. Its gene-based tests proved worthless, and the research behind them was discredited. Ms. Jacobs died a few months after treatment, and her husband and other patients’ relatives have retained lawyers.
The episode is a stark illustration of serious problems in a field in which the medical community has placed great hope: using patterns from large groups of genes or other molecules to improve the detection and treatment of cancer. Companies have been formed and products have been introduced that claim to use genetics in this way, but assertions have turned out to be unfounded. While researchers agree there is great promise in this science, it has yet to yield many reliable methods for diagnosing cancer or identifying the best treatment.
Instead, as patients and their doctors try to make critical decisions about serious illnesses, they may be getting worthless information that is based on bad science. The scientific world is concerned enough that two prominent groups, the National Cancer Institute and the Institute of Medicine, have begun examining the Duke case; they hope to find new ways to evaluate claims based on emerging and complex analyses of patterns of genes and other molecules.
This ran yesterday, ten days later.
News Analysis Add Patience to a Leap of Faith to Discover Cancer Signatures
By GINA KOLATA
Published: July 18, 2011
Are we outsmarting cancer? Or just ourselves?
Over the past several years, scientists have begun looking not just for individual genes linked to cancer, but for collections of genes and molecules, like proteins, that form telltale patterns, or signatures, that can be used to identify a cancer cell and reveal what drugs might kill it.
Signatures can be used to diagnose the disease, scientists hope, and to give a prognosis to patients who have cancer. But there have been few successes in this brave new world of cancer research, and some notable failures.