Personalised Medicine

Personalised healthcare is about matching medicines to the patients most likely to benefit from them. Not everyone responds to medicine in the same way. We work to either discover, or use existing biomarkers to determine, whether a medicine is likely to help an individual. I will explain how we approach the challenge and share some successful examples.

Cancer cells exploit immune-system checkpoints or safety switches that normally prevent the immune system unleashing an aggressive response against the body's own cells. New therapies, known, as checkpoint inhibitors, restore the immune system's ability to detect and destroy cancerous cells. I will describe key checkpoints, new therapies developed to target them and some of the challenges that still exist, most notably the effective selection of patients likely to benefit from these new and effective therapies.

The Human Genome Project took $3 billion and 10 years to complete. We can now sequence a human genome for just over $1000 in a matter of days. This offers amazing possibilities for healthcare; personalized medicine, new cancer treatments and the diagnosis of rare disease. Currently the principle of informed consent is central when patients undergo genetic testing in the hospital. However, when someone is being tested for potentially thousands of genes, I ask: is informed consent possible?