DUBAI: Every October the world turns pink. But the color that may matter most in the fight against cancer is one no one can see: the genetic code inside our own cells.
For decades, cancer treatment has often worked like a carpet bomb: hit hard, hit everything, and hope the patient is still standing at the end. Genomics, the study of a person’s DNA, is turning that into something closer to a precision strike.
“Using genomics in the treatment of cancer patients can affect the patient’s experience, and the family’s experience, throughout the cancer journey,” Ahmed Yacoub, head of global partnerships at Royal Marsden Private Care, told Arab News.
He points to three ways it is already changing the rules.
The first is counterintuitive: doing less. For patients on targeted therapy or chemotherapy, genomic insight allows doctors to personalize care and “drop some of the medications they are using,” Yacoub said.
The result, he said, is less toxicity, a better experience for patients and their families, “and of course less pain if it’s a painful treatment.” In a field where more has long meant better, medicine is learning the art of subtraction.
The second benefit comes after the all-clear. For patients who have been cured, genomics offers “early anticipation of any relapse they might incur,” turning the body’s own code into a smoke alarm that sounds before the fire spreads.
The third looks further ahead still. Genetic information gathered across populations can reveal inherited factors that raise a person’s risk, Yacoub said, opening the door to early detection and even “preventive measures for these patients to help them avoid getting cancer.”
The stakes are hard to overstate. The world recorded an estimated 20 million new cancer cases and 9.7 million deaths in 2022, according to the World Health Organization’s cancer agency, IARC, which projects new cases will exceed 35 million a year by 2050, a 77 percent jump.
Breast cancer, the focus of this month’s pink ribbons, accounted for 2.3 million new cases and 670,000 deaths in 2022. On current trends, IARC expects annual cases to rise 38 percent and deaths 68 percent by mid-century.
Against those numbers, a medicine that hurts less, warns earlier and prevents more is no luxury.
“It’s not like the traditional ways of having to suffer from the side effects, the toxicity, and sometimes the pain,” Yacoub said.
Pink ribbons raise awareness. Genomics may help turn that awareness into fewer goodbyes.