Lincoln Nadauld, MD, PhD, executive director of Intermountain Precision Genomics, has been at the forefront of Intermountain’s effort to change the way cancer is treated. Before cancer genomics, a person with cancer was bombarded with a combination of chemotherapy, radiation, and/or surgery. Yet the body can only take so much and patients are left with several and potentially extreme side effects. Quality of life was severely compromised in the hopes of beating the disease.
Nadauld and the genomics team has been looking at the personalized and unique DNA of individual patients. It opened doors to manufacture personalized medication that give patients a more effective treatment plan. The cancer therapy helps to improve survival rates and quality of life for patients without increasing treatment costs.
GenomeWeb, an online news organization that covers the latest in research of molecular biology and diagnostics, profiled the program with a Q&A article with Nadauld in February. He talked about the current state of research, genetic tumor profiling, and the new presidential initiatives.
“It is a very exciting time for cancer. There are so many new drugs and diagnostic technologies available that it’s allowing us to take this precision medicine approach,” Nadauld said in the GenomeWeb Q&A article.
“I was very happy to see that at a national and federal level, leaders have recognized that previously we declared war on cancer under the direction of President Nixon in 1971, and now we have sufficiently developed enough new technology and science that we need to have another push at transforming cancer, turning it into a chronic disease or in some cases even curing it,” Nadauld said.
The White House invited Nadauld to represent Intermountain at the Precision Medicine Summit in Washington D.C. hosted by President Barrack Obama last month. There Intermountain pledged to grant patients access to their personal cancer genomic data and genome information.
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The Precision Genomics team has shown that they are leading the healthcare industry into this new age of cancer research and treatment.
You can read the entire GenomeWeb Q&A article with Lincoln Nadauld (premium content). To learn more about Intermountain’s Precision Genomics.