DLVR: Using personalized medicine and nature’s cellular toolkit to target cancer tumours
Every six weeks, MaRS Innovation’s marketing and communications manager writes a guest post for the MaRS Discovery District blog profiling MI’s activities or one of our start-up companies. This post coincided with World Cancer Day.
What if you could use a cancer tumour’s proteomic profile to make it easier to target and destroy?
Targeting specific proteins on the surface of individual tumours—or, more precisely, targeting a cell receptor that naturally allows substances to pass into a cell—would allow clinicians to more effectively deliver drugs designed to deactivate cancer-promoting genes within the tumour, while minimizing the addition of toxins to the patient’s body.
Personalized medicine research in Toronto also benefited from a recent $50 million donation to support Princess Margaret Hospital (part of the University Health Network). Read and watch the news announcement on BioTechnology Focus.
This is personalized medicine’s promise for cancer treatment: targeted therapies that stand a better chance of success, with reduced side effects, based on the unique profile of a patient’s tumour, either administered on their own or in combination with traditional chemotherapy.
