Gene technology in a nutshell
It is Dr. Michael Paumen who puts the complex subject of gene technology not only into perspective but also in a nutshell.
He compares and contrasts this field to information technology (IT). Pointing out how the IT revolution has changed our lives, he talks of the impact of little computers and smart phones. If a person is lost in a new city, a map-app will help him find his way back to his hotel. Unimaginable 20 years ago, now there is e-mail and videoconferencing at the touch of a button.
“The same thing is happening in bio-technology and it is equally important and life-changing,” he says.
Dr. Paumen who is based in Singapore is the Senior Director, Medical Sciences, Asia Pacific and Japan, Thermo Fisher Scientific, Life Sciences Solutions Group, which has provided the sophisticated equipment to Credence Genomics. Thermo Fisher is headquartered in the United States of America.
He picks out three areas where people have better options due to this revolution – cancer, infectious diseases and inherited diseases.
Referring to the Human Genome Project, he explains how it helped the world learn a lot about genetic bases, thereby leading to more knowledge on which genes cause which disease. “We still don’t know everything, but there has been tremendous progress. This coupled with advances in technology is fuelling this revolution and the latest is New Generation Sequencing (NGS).
The process, he tells the Sunday Times, has been the in-depth study of this field by academia followed by research and once the re- search has been tested and found to be robust, application in clinical and patient management. There has been an increase of knowledge of genes and also an increase in technology.
“There has been tremendous progress in sequencing or decoding our genes and our genome. It is now being done faster, cheaper and better (more accurately). How fast it is being done is impressive. Ten years ago decoding a whole genome took about a year and cost a million dollars. Now it would take only about three days and cost over a little more than a thousand dollars,” he says, adding that costs are coming down.
Next he deals with his speciali- ty, genomic oncology, on which this technology has had a major impact. Taking up lung cancer, he says that earlier there were limited options. If detected too late, it would be a death sentence for the patient.
Even otherwise it would be dealt with “primitive” and “brutal” methodology. The answer lay in chemotherapy and radiation. Under this Stone-Age method, there would be a blast of so-called treatment which would randomly kill cells. This method is unsatisfactory as the patients may die anyway.
Now, however, there is ‘personalised’ or ‘precision’ medicine and targeted therapy, where earlier there had been not much improvement in 30 years and survival rates were unsatisfactory. There is now more information on what drives those tumours and makes lung cancer progress. Over the last five years, half a dozen more genes that cause lung cancer have been identified and more drugs to attack them are being developed.
This would give lung cancer patients a quality of life they have not had with ‘one size fits all’ chemotherapy and radiation, it is learnt.
“Therefore, if you have lung cancer or any other cancer, there are more options,” says Dr. Paumen, reiterating that before NGS, one gene was tested at a time. Now a dozen are tested at the same time and patients do not have to have needles being sent frequently into the lungs for biopsies. “NGS allows the whole picture to be seen, for the NGS platform is entirely for patient management.”