What is precision medicine?

[Music] what is precision medicine so precision medicine is a very hot topic across a variety of areas of medicine and from my standpoint there are two big components of precision medicine one is something we very traditionally think about and one is something that's a little more abstract but is equally as important if not more important at the moment so precision medicine that we talk about now is finding a specific drug for a specific patient understanding that your myeloma may be different from someone else's myeloma we need to find out what's special about your myeloma to give you specific targeted therapy venetoclax is a great example of this if you have an 11 14 11 14 translocation but someone else does not giving you venetoclax is a precise way of attacking your individual myeloma if you have other factors about your myeloma if they're driven by other genetic markers or if there's something else about your myeloma that we understand to target it from a genetic level that's one type of precision medicine and ultimately our hope is to develop this much in the same way that we manage urinary tract infections when people get urinary tract infections you pee in a cup they process it in a lab they put little discs of all the antibiotics on the on the agar and we know in a few days which antibiotic will fight your urinary tract infection and we give you that antibiotic and you get better our hope is to develop precision medicine in much the same way from myeloma that we can take a sample of blood or bone marrow put it in a machinery and it spits out an answer and says for jane doe for john smith this is exactly the right therapy to use based off of their genetics that's the classical description of precision medicine but to me precision medicine has another component and that's where we think of the individual factors that make up you as a person so things like steroid dosage prophylactic medicine iv hydration and supportive care these things are crucial to providing optimal treatment for an individual patient steroids are all part of our therapies but we may decide to give someone a lower dose because they have diabetes or have big side effects we may take a drug like revlimid and dose reduce it in an individual because their blood counts may be too low these small things which may not seem like much are actually the cornerstone of what i envision as precision medicine in the current day where we take all the information we have at our hand and it may not be specifically genetically driven but how to use the drugs and how to support you best through it is our way of precisely defining a treatment plan for an individual