Theranostics Health LLC is a company that was formed by George Mason University cancer researchers Dr. Lance Liotta and Emanuel Petricoin.
The company plans to tailor cancer treatments to individual patients based on proteomics, the study of proteins. Proteins play a central role in our bodies. Understanding the structure and function of each protein and its complexities of protein interactions can be critical for developing the most effective diagnostic techniques and disease treatments in the future.
Information about protein activity in tumors can allow doctors to choose the best drugs to kill the cancer cells. President and CEO of the company Joseph Reilly said "The physicians will then be provided a new class of information about that patients' individual cancer. This will enable the physician to tailor the therapy based on the individual patients' tumor."
One size fits all for cancer treatment is hopefully on its way out. We need to prescribe the right therapy to the right patient. This will increase treatment success rates and also spare patients unnecessary toxicity from chemotherapy drugs that would be unsuitable for their tumor.
1. According to the American Cancer Society, even though ovarian cancer accounts for only 4% of all cancers among women, it ranks as the fifth cause of death from it. A majority of ovarian cancer patients are not diagnosed until they reach the later stages of the disease. Once the cancer has metastasized, it is much harder to treat. There is a need to detect ovarian cancer in its early stages. There are no effective and proven tests for finding ovarian cancer in the early stages like mammography for breast cancer.
One of the most promising new approaches that may deal with early detection of ovarian cancer is called Proteomics (Protein Expression Analysis), the study of proteins in the cells, tissues and body fluids. Even before a tumor can be felt, some researchers have found, the tumor begins secreting a distinctive pattern, or fingerprint of proteins. Here, you go beyond genes (DNA, the Genomic Analysis or structure of the human genome) and beyond Gene Expression (the measure of RNA content, like Her2/neu in breast cancer) to measure the actual proteins themselves.
Genomic Analysis is only important insofar as it influences Gene Expression Analysis, which is only important insofar as it influences Protein Expression Analysis (Proteonomics), which is only important insofar as it influences Protein Function Analysis (are proteins active or inactive), which is only important insofar as it influences Cell Function Analysis (cell culture testing), which is only important insofar as it influences Disease Analysis (doing something to treat the patient and then making a measurement on the patient with CT/PET scanning), in that order. There is an inverse hierachy between relevance and ease of measurement.
There are many pathways to altered cellular ("forest") function (hence all the different "trees" which correlate in different situations). It serves to validate functional profiling. The forest is looked at, and not the trees. Functional profiling measures what happens at the end (the effects on the forest), rather than the status of the individual trees. Cancer is a complex disease and needs to be attacked on many fronts. The best thing to do is to combine these different tests in ways which make the most sense. The future of cancer therapy will be personalized treatments for individual patients, and will require a combination of novel diagnostics and therapeutics.
Source: Cell Function Analysis
Posted at 5:14PM on Mar 29th 2007 by Gregory D. Pawelski