Cancer treatment at St. Jude

Sooner or later, some political leader will realize that the most important goal in healthcare is extending health expectancy.  This is a complicated matter involving many things from changing personal behaviors to changing environmental policies.  But a crucial part is the accurate diagnosis of disease, and prediction of which therapy will be most effective—especially for children who hold the greatest potential for extending health.  To that end, St. Jude Children’s Hospital has recently completed a study of “multiomics”—i.e. whole genome sequencing, whole exome sequencing, and RNA sequencing—on 253 cancer patients.  This screening cost $8,600 per child, which is in keeping with other cancer care expenses.  This multiomics approach found molecular lesions that genome sequencing alone had not discovered; they predicted which drug would be most effective in 79% of the cases, and returned results in 30 days.    MORE

Image Credit:   St.Jude Children’s Hospital