ASCO President George Sledge Discusses the Challenge and Promise of the Genomic Era
By Susan Beck | June 13, 2011
Executive Editor, Oncology
In his plenary address as outgoing president of ASCO, Dr. George Sledge proposed that we are on the brink of a new era in cancer therapy—an era of genome-based treatment. He stressed that this new “genomic era” holds great promise for patients, citing as evidence a recent paper in JAMA that described a case in which the results of deep sequencing of a patient’s leukemic cells led to successful individualized therapy. At the same time, he underscored the fact that this new era poses a number of challenges for oncologists. With a sense of optimism and his characteristic clarity, he went on to outline these challenges—and to propose steps the profession can take to meet them.
ASCO President George Sledge speaks during the Opening Session-
Cancer treatment to-date, he said, can be roughly divided into three eras: the era of local-regional therapy, which began in the early 1900s; the era of nonspecific systemic therapy, which started in the late 1940s; and the era of targeted therapies, which has come into its own in the last decade—and which is still very much with us.
http://www.cancernetwork.com/conference-reports/asco2011/content/article/10165/1877441