MUHC hopes to extend lives with precision oncology – Montreal | The Canadian News

David Platts hopes that a new medicine he is receiving will help extend his life.

The McGill University Health Center (MUHC) patient has stage 4 liver cancer, but has just started on a prescription drug that targets a specific mutation in his tumor.

“It is very exciting to learn that there is a particular possible treatment,” Platts told Global News.

The MUHC repurposed an existing drug to treat her cancer after scientists at its research institute sequenced a mutation in her tumor and found a drug that can treat it.

“This is the first time that this particular drug has been used in Canada for this particular mutation,” Dr. Peter Metrakos, lead scientist at the MUHC research institute, told Global News.

The MUHC Research Institute (RI) focuses on precision oncology, which is much more focused on treating individual cancerous tumors in patients.

Metrakos says its research team has been working on this type of medical breakthrough for years and it’s targeted, as opposed to a more general, one-size-fits-all approach, that didn’t work for Platts.

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“We were running out of therapeutic options, so the tumor was progressing,” Metrakos said.

More than 60 scientists work in RI’s department of oncology working on precision oncology. Some researchers are shaving razor-thin fragments of human liver tissue with cancerous tumors attached to them and placing them on slides where they will be analyzed.

Other tumors are being grown in test tubes where they can be tested and treated externally.

Scientists hope that all of this work will lead to new medical breakthroughs.

“Hopefully we can, in the next few years, show some change in the treatment of cancer patients,” Miran Rada, a researcher in the MUHC’s department of oncology, told Global News.

A recent grant of $ 2 million donated to MUHC is helping fund medical advancements in the department of oncology.

“This donation will really allow us to bring precision oncology right here to the MUHC,” Julie Quenneville, president and CEO of the MUHC Foundation, told Global News.

Platts’ new treatment is not a cure, but it is supposed to prolong his life.

“It’s going to give me a few more months, if not more time than that, to have a good time with family and loved ones,” he said.