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This is Gordon Mills
from the MD Anderson Cancer Center
where I'm the chair of the Department
of Systems Biology,
the co-director of the Khalifa Institute
for Personalized Cancer Therapy,
the director of the Kleberg Center
for Molecular Markers,
and co-director
of Women's Cancer Moonshot.
I'm going to present today a systems approach
to the implementation
of personalized cancer therapy.
Some of what I will be presenting
would also be characterized
as a systematic approach
to delivering an improved response
for our patients in terms of
targeted therapy and immunotherapy.
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Today we have an opportunity
to characterize patient tumors
in the breadth and depth
that we had not been able to do
even 10 or 15 years ago.
This is allowing us to move
away from relatively blunt
but effective instruments
of radiation therapy and chemotherapy
to targeting the genetic aberrations
that are specific to each patient's cancer
using small molecule inhibitors,
targeting the genetic
aberrations present in the tumors,
and immune oncology agents capitalizing
on the genomic instability and new antigens
that are presented by the tumor.
This gives us an opportunity
to move away from approaches
that generally targeted
cellular proliferation
and had a limited therapeutic index
to capitalizing on the vulnerabilities
that occur when a tumor develops.
This development of tumors
results in changes
as in important signaling pathways
that leads to a much more
limited heterogeneity of the tumor
and a much more limited ability to deal
with the stress of therapy that we use.
I'll come back
to that a little bit later.
