The Patient Equation

7Cancer and Phage Therapy—Crafting Custom Treatments Just for You

In 1971, U.S. President Richard Nixon announced a war on cancer, and yet almost 50 years later, there has been relatively little progress made compared to expectations. The biggest challenge is the complexity of the disease—or, as we ought to say, diseases. Cancer isn't one disease, it's many—and, in fact, in some ways, it's a different disease for just about every patient, with a number of individual factors contributing to every tumor, and every case. It is often hard to find evidence of cancer before it is too late to cure, treatments that work for one person's illness often don't work for another's, and the cancer itself can change over time to become resistant to a treatment that's working and require an entirely new strategy. When we talk about personalized medicine, it doesn't get much more personalized than cancer treatment—and when we talk about the need for precision, the stakes are rarely as high as they are here.

Later in this chapter, we'll talk about another very personalized approach to a complex, individual problem: phage therapy, or using custom bacteriophages to treat serious bacterial infections. But we'll start our exploration of personalized patient equations with cancer. On the diagnosis end, there are certainly intriguing developments—just as one example, a startup, Cyrcadia Health, developed a patch for women to wear under their bra in order to track breast tissue temperature, alerting ...