Cath Lab Digest

  Molecular medicine, an approach to customized care based on the patient’s genome, is a burgeoning field. The ability to predict responses to tyrosine kinase inhibitors is important for both optimizing patient outcomes where these drugs are expected to be effective and for avoiding them when there will be no benefit. Finding the mutations that will allow successful treatment is analogous to testing bacteria for antibiotic sensitivity where you want to target your treatment and the further refinement of assays that are reliable and reproducible will continue to come to market to the benefit of our patients.

  Transgenomic's technology that allows non-invasive testing for genetic markers is intriguing though not the first of this sort of clever approach. For example, as a Dermatologist, I am particularly intrigued by Dermtech http://www.dermtech.com/. Their EGIR™ (Epidermal Genetic Information Retrieval) can diagnose melanoma based on the stripping of superficial skin cells from above a pigmented lesion!

  The Personal Genome Project http://www.personalgenomes.org/ and similar efforts http://www.genomicslawreport.com/index.php/tag/personal-genome-project/ are heading toward a $1000 mapping of your entire genome so stay tuned as more science fiction becomes fact.