How TGen is becoming a bigger player in precision medicine.
Precision targeting by TGen may take pain out of cancer care
Imagine being treated for breast cancer and not getting sick.
It’s no dream for Jennifer Dunn, a 33-year-old Arizona breast-cancer patient — and my daughter — whose story was recently shared via social media.
“I made it to the three-week point where I would have had chemo but just had an injection of a targeted drug instead,” she said in the post. “It took 30 minutes and I had zero side effects Dr. Jeffrey Trent is president and research director at TGen. besides the taste of saline in my mouth. I just couldn’t believe it. No side effects. I sat there receiving it and had to tell my heart to calm down.
“You see, after a while, walking through those doors for treatment is brutal. You know it is necessary, but it is walking towards suffering. So walking through those doors to receive a critical drug that does nothing
but its job is hard to believe.”
Her experience illustrates the idea behind precision medicine, which harnesses big data, genomics and a patient’s own immune system to provide more targeted treatment for diseases.
Precision medicine could revolutionize patient care as we know it, and this year Phoenix’s Translational Genomics Research Institute is becoming a larger player in it.
Our recent alliance with California’s City of Hope means there is huge potential to accelerate TGen’s innovative research on many fronts, especially leveraging their decades-long efforts in using a patient’s own immune system to fight disease. Playing off each other’s complementary strengths, we look forward to pioneering discoveries and better patient outcomes.
Trials are underway in Arizona