MDS Treatment: Prof. David Bowen talks about genetics, where we are now and where we’re heading
5 Apr. 2018Sophie Wintrich, Chief Executive of the MDS UK Patient Support Group, interviewed Prof. David Bowen – Consultant Haematologist at St James University Hospital, Leeds. Watch the video and read the excerpts below.
"We've always practiced personalised medicine"
"Personalised medicine means that you sit with an individual in front of you and you consider them as an individual, and you talk about their disease, their type of MDS in the context of their problems, their symptoms, so it's always been personalised. It's always been personalised in that you use your intuition, your experience and your judgement in the management of that patient."
"To practice good, proper precision medicine, you need the biological data, you need an idea of their quality of life, you need an idea of the diseases affecting that patient and you need an idea of that person's preferences. There are many factors now playing into the concept of personalised or precision medicine. The general view is that precision medicine is all about genomics, but it isn't..."
Should we start to insist that all MDS patients must have a genetic mutation test to establish what treatments may work out best for them?
"Genomic medicine is very much the happening field of cancer biology at the moment, and MDS is no exception. In fact MDS has been leading the way"..."We can tell from a set of mutations that we analyse which MDS patient has which mutations; but there are many technical reasons why one mutation may be relevant, and the same gene mutated in another patient might not be causing the disease or might not be present in a high enough quantity to be sure that it's actually relevant."
"The more we know about this field, the more complex the analysis of the data becomes." "Whether every patient needs a genetic test for routine management is debatable, because there are relatively few drugs that we use that are actually able to target the mutations that we know are there. If we see mutation X, we use drug Y - we are not quite there yet."
What would be the research benefit of collecting tissue samples from all MDS patients? How can patients ensure this happens?
"Research is always important. Without research we don't make progress. There is more of an acceptance today that large data sets from routinely treated patients are just as valuable as clinical trials that we do in parallel."
"We have a big registry programme here in Yorkshire and Humber where we are doing mutation analysis on all MDS patients, following over time, from a population of about 3,000,000 people... In the European Registry we are doing something similar. It is great if a patient can participate in this. All these initiatives are going to inform the way we treat patients in the future."
