What role do biopsies play in personalized medicine?

Bradford Wood, MD, senior investigator at the National Institutes of Health, explains how biopsies help doctors determine the unique characteristics of a tumor -- and use that information to personalize treatment.

Transcript

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Oftentimes we have to know what we're doing before we actually go and kill it with these techniques. And we often do biopsies before the treatment

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or on the same day as the treatment to know exactly what's going on and what we're dealing with. What's the genetic fingerprint of that tumor?

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What markers is it expressing? How is it going to respond to drugs? Which opens up another door towards the personalization

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of oncology. So personalized medicine, deciding what drugs are going to work for what patient at what time, right patient, right drug, right time.

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And knowing that is key to the future of personalized medicine.

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Knowing what part of a tumor to sample so we know the fingerprints of that tumor. Getting that information requires

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knowing what part of the tumor is potentially most metabolically active. Information noise goes in, noise comes out.

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Information is only as good as what you get from a biopsy. And we really pride ourselves on being

00:58

able to tame the beast of cancer heterogeneity. What do I mean by that?

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Every tumor is not all the same fingerprint, genetic profile, or proteins expressed. So if you have a tumor, we can often use imaging--

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PET scan metabolic imaging, for example-- to decide what part of the tumor is most metabolically active

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and might have the most likely fingerprint which will best correlate with the drugs we select, or will best

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tell us whether the drugs we're giving are actually working, and best tell us how to advise that patient about prognosis.

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So being able to use this technology, this medical GPS for biopsy, lets us sample the appropriate part of a tumor