Personalized medicine
Personalized medicine

Focus on Humans: Personalized Medicine

People are different – and each patient needs a customized therapy

This insight is increasingly applied in medicine: personalized medicine takes the individual conditions of each patient into account. This implies that a two meter tall man weighting 100 kg needs another dose different than that of a woman who is 1.60 meter tall with a weight of 48 kg. Personalized medicine has long gone further and also considers the patient’s nature at the genetic and molecular level. In this process, personalized medicine takes biomarkers into consideration as they can be used to analyze processes in human body. In the field of cancer medicine, specific gene sequences or surface proteins of the tumor cells belong to the popular biomarkers. Biomarker research presently help patients suffering from breast cancer: One quarter of the patients show an excessive building of a specific growth factor receptor protein. Personalized medicine ensures that women receive a drug that inhibits these overactive cells with precision and thus slow down the tumor growth and the formation of metastases. This would save time for parallel treatments, especially in the event of aggressive fast-growing tumors, as radiotherapy for example.

A further step: personalized radiotherapy

Personalized medicine is not limited only to radiotherapy. Consequently, medical research groups presently focus in clinics and radiation treatment centers on the molecular markers that present different types of cancers and how radiation efficiency can be achieved from these markers. The genetic modifications that result from cancer cells have an influence on how a tumor may react positively to the various therapies. The more the insights in the field of personalized medicine evolve, the more accurately and efficiently can radiation be developed for different patients.

The Radiotherapy Patient System RPS also has modern processes for personalized medicine and also to identify each individual patient. This includes, for example, the integrated RFID (radio-frequency identification) Reader, that captures the body and the position of the patient without any contact, therefore enabling an exact positioning under the linear accelerator. We would be happy to give you more information on how RPS supports personalized medicine and improves the modern radiation of cancer patients. Write to info@gkteso.de.