Institute for Personalized Medicine

Personalized Therapy for Each Patient

Fox Chase's new Institute for Personalized Medicine is on the forefront of a transformation in cancer care. Unlike the traditional method of delivering care, this approach will base treatment on the genetic makeup of an individual patient's tumor, making the "one-size-fits-all" approach to cancer therapy a thing of the past. Through the Institute for Personalized Medicine, our doctors and researchers are using leading edge technology to expand the understanding of cancer genetics, develop clinical trials of new treatments, and match emerging drug treatments to the unique genetics of individual patient tumors.

The immediate objective of the Institute for Personalized Medicine is to sequence exons from genes known to impact key, targetable, signaling pathways in patients with metastatic disease.

Customized Oncology

"Personalized medicine is truly transformational," says Jeff Boyd, senior vice president and chief scientific officer. "It's impossible to overstate this inflection point that cancer medicine is entering. The whole premise of how cancers are treated becomes not the tissue of origin, or how it looks under a microscope, how it looks to the surgeon, how it looks to the pathologist, but how it looks to the DNA sequencer," Boyd says.

The Institute for Personalized Medicine will build on Fox Chase's already substantialBiosample Repository and Tumor Bank to add an additional layer of new knowledge about the genetic information in individual patient tumors. Fox Chase will also use this information to accelerate the development of new cancer treatments through collaboration with its highly regarded Phase 1 Clinical Trials Program, which tests a broad spectrum of novel cancer therapeutics in patients with advanced cancer.

Vision

Our vision is one in which at the time of diagnosis and again at disease progression, a patient's cancer will be sequenced either for selected genes of interest or the entire genome. The resultant information will be housed in a searchable database, thereby allowing patients to be matched to particular drugs based upon mechanism of action, regardless of the phase of clinical trial. Updated eligibility criteria will no longer state the requirement for a given disease but instead will articulate a far more sophisticated paradigm focusing on pathway activation, gene amplification, gene mutation, or combinations thereof.