If you were diagnosed with cancer or another disease, wouldn’t you want your treatment and medicines to be as unique as you are?
This is a growing trend in medicine where the type of treatment a patient gets depends on their DNA.
A few weeks ago, Dr. Hank Kaplan of the Swedish Cancer Institute spoke with KING5 about the I-SPY clinical trial.
The usual treatment for breast cancer may be surgery, followed by chemotherapy, possibly radiation and as a last resort, a clinical trial.
The I-SPY clinical trial turns that thinking upside down by actually extracting DNA from a tumor to figure out which new drug will likely work best, then giving it to the patient first, even before surgery.
"The goal of the I-SPY trial is really to develop a faster and cheaper way to develop new drugs for breast cancer . We're hoping that this is a new paradigm that will work for other kinds of cancer too," said Dr. Kaplan.
To learn more about the I-SPY clinical trial at Swedish, call our clinical research line at 206-215-3086. To learn more about cancer, you can download podcasts or click here to learn more.
