Saving Lives With Tailor-Made Medication

NY Times' Terrorist Tip Sheet ^ | August 29, 2006 | CLAUDIA DREIFUS

[neverdem]

A Conversation With Mary V. Relling

MEMPHIS — In Mary V. Relling’s office in St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital sits a small ceramic statue of St. Jude Thaddeus, the patron saint of impossible causes.

Dr. Relling, the head of the department of pharmaceutical sciences at St. Jude, has a fondness for impossible causes.

Her own is pharmacogenetics, a clinical discipline in which doctors use high-tech genetic testing to custom-make drugs to patients’ individual needs.

Though pharmacogenetics is controversial and not yet widely done, Dr. Relling, 46, travels the country advocating its use. At St. Jude, patients with leukemia are now routinely given genetic tests to determine their individual response to a medication. “We’ve seen it save lives here,” she said. “That’s made me a believer.”

When hundreds of patients are given a drug, she continued, “some will get no benefit, others will have terrible side effects, and still others will get benefits with tolerable side effects.”

Gene variants may be the cause.

Q. How is this tailoring of drugs different from the way they’re currently ordered?

A. Till now, there’s been a one-size-fits-all approach. In most cases, an average dose of a medication is ordered, and then, if the patient suffers side effects, the dosage is adjusted. With gene testing, we can customize the prescription.

Here at St. Jude, we’ve been gene-testing every child who comes to us with leukemia. I study acute lymphoblastic leukemia — A.L.L., the most common childhood cancer. When a youngster comes in with A.L.L., we get a sample of their DNA. We put it on a special computer chip that scans a half-million different places on the genome. Mostly, we’re looking for unusual variations of the genes and misspellings of the genetic code.

We have a database from earlier patients that helps us predict a...

[KoRn]

I only halfway understand this, but it seems amazing.

[ExtremeUnction]

I only halfway understand this, but it seems amazing.

Danny Thomas. the Lebanese immigrant/comedian made a deal with God. He was in despair, and prayed that if he could become a success in America, he would repay the debt many fold. The result is St. Jude's Hospital. They now cure the majority of children who present at their institution with acute lymphoblastic leukemia. The cost to the families. Nothing.

[WVNan]

Thank you for the nice commercial for St Jude. It's a marvelous place. My first-born son died there in 79. He was the oldest known person to have Juvenile bone cancer, Ewing's Sarchoma. They treated him for three years before he died and, as you say, the cost was nothing. He did donate his body to the hospital for research. He was 22. They needed to do the research because they feared that the disease was leaping to adults, where it had only affected juveniles up to that point. The Kennedy boy who had his leg amputated had the same cancer.

St Jude is one of the few charities that I support because I know that the money is used as it's supposed to be used.

[Conservative Goddess]

neat stuff ping.

[Badray]

neat stuff bump