The Weill Cornell Medicine’s https://weill.cornell.edu Englander Institute for Precision Medicine https://epipm.weill.cornell.edu uses computational biology to tailor the treatment of cancers.
The Institute is working closely with the Meyer Cancer Center in molecular and genomic pathology. According to Dr. Olivier Elemento, Director of the Englander Institute, “We now have access to technologies such as high-throughput sequencing that can help scan entire genomes in just a few hours to be able to understand what is driving the disease within each patient.”
Unlike treatments that use a blanket strategy of radiation or chemotherapy to destroy tumors, precision medicine is about creating a therapy that targets a particular mutation, which can vary from patient to patient.
In order to radically improve diagnostic and treatment capabilities and develop strategies tailored to the individual patient, Weill Cornell Medicine is investing in an expansion of precision medicine well beyond cancer.
This effort will require the expertise of physician and scientists at the Meyer Cancer Center and others in computational biology, data science, genomics, and epi-genomics, population health sciences, cancer, pathology and clinical research. Also needed is massive computing power to collect and aggregate information from genetic sequencing, imaging, pathology labs and other sources.
By using this information, clinicians will be able to identify high risk patients and recommend early intervention strategies to not just treat but also to prevent disease which is a concept called precision health.
Dr. Elemento reports, “The future of medicine is about applying precision health to every disease. For example, whole genome sequencing will allow us to understand how to treat illnesses like diabetes and heart disease and how to match each patient to the right therapy based on their genes and how to prevent diseases from occurring in the first place.”