The Stephanie Event

You should read this article in Esquire about the advent of personalized cancer treatment for a heroic patient named Stephanie Lee.  Here is Steve Hsu’s blog post. The cost of sequencing is almost at the point where everyone can have their normal and tumor cells completely sequenced to look for mutations like Stephanie. The team at Mt.  Sinai Hospital in New York described in the article inserted some of the mutations into a fruit fly and then checked to see what drugs killed it. The Stephanie Event was the oncology board meeting at Sinai where the treatment for Stephanie Lee’s colon cancer, which had spread to the liver, was discussed. They decided on a standard protocol but would use the individualized therapy based on the fly experiments if the standard treatments failed.  The article was beautifully written, combining a compelling human story with science.