Where Dr Victoria Villaflor Thinks the Future of Precision Medicine Is Headed

There are small subgroups within each tumor type and within each molecular type, and someday, we might be able to actually pair the 2 to give patients a little bit more personalization and precision to their treatments, said Victoria Villaflor, MD, associate professor of Medicine, hematology and oncology.

Transcript

Looking ahead, where do you think the future of precision medicine is headed?

Where I think and where I hope, I hope collide. What I think at some point in the future is that patients are going to go in and have testing done and be evaluated. And based on a number of items, including their performance status, other underlying comorbidities, and probably a chip of all of their genetic and molecular material, is going to actually be put into a computer, which will hopefully spit out "this will be the best treatment or intervention," because it’s not all based on treatment, but also on interventions for you, whether it be surgery, radiation, some kind chemotherapy, or a targeted therapy, or immune therapy.

That being said, there’s a lot of other things that will play a role, and they will need to obviously be monitored. It won’t be like walking and hitting the computer key like you do in a grocery store. But, I think that things are going to advance based on a lot of the smaller data because not all people are alike the way we used to do studies. There are small subgroups within each tumor type and within each molecular type, and hopefully, at some day, we’ll be able to actually pair the 2 to give patients a little bit more personalization and precision to their treatments.