Friday, October 9, 2015

Genetics May Help Guide Kids' Cancer Treatment

This article talks about how there are other options out there for children in need of cancer treatment. The approach they took was finding a personalized way of figuring out what is unique about the children's cancer and trying to attack it with drugs. There has been great strides to treating children's cancer from the 1960's until now but it still might not be enough. For example, Leukemia and certain tumors in the nervous system are not yet resolved as they continue to fight all the drugs thrown at them. The recurrence of a child's cancer are very difficult to overcome and the odds of fixing the issue are very low. 

Childhood Cancer is a growing issue in need of attention as doctors still do not have solutions to many major problems.  Dr. John Maris mentioned that the biggest obstacle in the way is that newer drugs may not be safe enough for children as well as having minimal effects on the kids.

A test was done at Mott Children's hospital consisting of 91 kids in which they analyzed each child's genome. 46 percent of the kids had a genetic finding in which they were placed on drugs intended to fight cancer. Only 9 children had partial or complete recoveries which drives the point home on children's medicine. The many drugs out there are not suited or designed for children. A new system must be developed with safer and more efficient drugs that the kids are more likely to respond to.



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1 comment:

  1. AnonymousOctober 10, 2015 at 1:05 PM

    This is so awesome to hear, especially because childhood cancer seems to be becoming more and more relevant these days unfortunately. There is a set of genes that determine whether or not a cell has density dependent inhibition or not, I wonder if that was one of the genomes that was looked at.

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