Genomes

I asked my Onc a while back why he hadn't tested my tumor against the various chemo's I was going to do to make sure they would work. He explained to me that there isn't a way of doing that yet. If I can figure out how to do that that is the million dollar quest right now. He explained that once the tumor is taken out of the body, for some unknown reason tests don't work on tumor to find answers to this quest.

This morning I was reading the New York times and there was an article talking about the prospect of getting closer to this. You can read it if you copy and paste the article below. I uploaded a paragraph below, that you can read.

Scientists Decode Set of Cancer Genes (NY times)

The findings will not help patients immediately, but researchers say they could lead to new therapies and will almost certainly help doctors make better choices among existing treatments, based on a more detailed genetic picture of each patient’s cancer. Though the research involved leukemia, the same techniques can also be used to study the genomes of other cancers, and the researchers expect to apply them to breast, brain and lung cancers.

You can read the entire article if you copy and past this link:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/06/health/research/06cancer.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin