by Ken Alltucker - Sept. 6, 2012 11:15 PM The Republic | azcentral.com

The right drug for the right person at the right time.

The pioneers of medicine's Genetic Age have long predicted that personalized drug treatments are inevitable as technology improves and costs plummet.

Although genetic medicine so far has produced more hype than substance, there are signs that medical treatments based on an individual's genes are tantalizingly close for some.

Pharmaceutical companies are investing tens of millions of dollars on developing tailored tests and drugs that identify and attack malfunctioning genes. High-powered machines can sequence an entire genome in a day, compared with earlier models that took weeks or even months to map out all of a person's genetic information.

In Arizona, nowhere is the prospect of personalized medicine more evident than at Mayo Clinic in Scottsdale and the Translational Genomics Research Institute in Phoenix.

Mayo Clinic, with an assist from TGen, is among the first wave of U.S. medical and research institutions offering people the potential of life-extending treatments based on a unique examination of their genes.

Those who are willing to spend $50,000 to $75,000 can have billions of their own genes decoded, sequenced and analyzed in an effort to figure out a personalized remedy to treat cancer or other life-threatening diseases.

Using a technology called whole-genome sequencing, Mayo and TGen researchers compare the DNA and other key genetic information from an individual's healthy cells and tumor cells to find a single gene or group of genes responsible for a cancer's growth.

Mayo's new initiative, part of its Center for Individualized Medicine, has attracted more than a dozen patients to metro Phoenix from places such as Houston and Canada and as far away as Russia in the hopes that technology can deliver a medical miracle.

More:
Mayo, TGen close in on personalized gene therapy

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