Transcript
Announcer:
You’re listening to Clinician’s Roundtable on ReachMD. On this episode, we’ll hear from Dr. Stephen Y. Chan, who’s a Professor of Medicine at the University of Pittsburgh, where he also serves as Director of the Vascular Medicine Institute and Director of the Center for Pulmonary Vascular Biology and Medicine. He’ll be discussing the path toward precision medicine for pulmonary arterial hypertension, or PAH. Here’s Dr. Chan now.
Dr. Chan:
It's kind of a double-edged sword in terms of, how do we determine which medications are going to be best for each individual patient? So far, the paradigm or the dogma of how we have treated PAH has been a little bit more algorithmic, meaning that everyone kind of gets the same sort of treatment. That is to say, it’s kind of a one-size-fits-all approach. Here's the group of medications we have. We can mix and match to a certain degree, but for the most part, we're going to start with a couple of them first, and then we're going to add on if we need to, and so on and so forth, which is not a bad way to do it. And I think that we've actually seen a lot of progress in the past years regarding that.
I think, however, we can do better based on increasing knowledge of what is driving disease in each person and each individual. And so I think that, as we expand out to these new medications, the next generation of drugs hopefully will also be accompanied by an understanding of which people do the best with which drugs and which people respond the worst, in that case.
And so, in that regard, partnering with biomarkers, imaging markers, and the ability to understand how each individual's disease process is going, and essentially matching it or coupling it to which medications are going to be best for that person, is something that we have not seen, at least at a very detailed, molecular level. I think we can get there in the future, and I think that that's what we are striving to get to.
We often talk about a term called precision medicine, that, oftentimes, is something that people in oncology and cancer biology are going to think about a lot more often, because everyone's tumor is slightly different, and depending upon that signature that you see in the tumor, you can actually give certain chemotherapies and so forth. I think that we have an ability to match the type of disease that each individual has with the best therapy that's going to be tailored specifically for that individual.
And that's something that we're all thinking is going to happen in the future. I think that's going to be possible, and it's going to be a very meaningful shift. I think that's going to mean that we have better therapies for each individual person, and that we are able to titrate those medications and determine which ones are good in real time, such that the medications you take five years ago may not be the same medications you take in five years, because your disease has actually reached a different stage, and we can titrate it, and we can monitor it, in that regard.
So I think that that's going to be very special. It's going to be something that we have not seen yet but that we hope is going to be part of the bigger and better future for our patients.
Announcer:
That was Dr. Stephen Y. Chan talking about the future of precision medicine in PAH. To access this and other episodes in our series, visit Clinician’s Roundtable on ReachMD.com, where you can Be Part of the Knowledge. Thanks for listening!
