Personalised medicine in cancer

The personalisation of medicine could bring huge benefits, especially for cancer patients.

It could allow earlier diagnosis of a disease or even identifying those at risk of disease, enabling more successful treatment or even prevention.

It could prevent money from being spent on unnecessary or futile therapies. It could reduce trial-and-error treatments and ensure that patients get optimum doses of optimum drugs.

Dr Angela George, Consultant in Oncogenetics, discusses how genomic technologies have impacted on the care of cancer patients.

Talking point

The funding of cancer treatments is always a difficult and contentious area, particularly for very expensive drugs used in terminally ill patients to prolong life.

Do you think the advent of personalised medicine will drive the costs of cancer treatments up or down?