Precision Medicine: Hope or Hype?

By Meg Barbor, MPH
February 10, 2018
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George Sledge, MD, FASCO

ALTHOUGH PRECISION medicine may be a recent discovery in some fields, it is an old story in the field of breast cancer, and one that has been exceptionally important in terms of managing the disease, according to George Sledge, MD, FASCO, Professor of Medicine and Medical Oncologist at the Stanford Cancer Center in Stanford, California.

“Precision medicine is real and has been a major driver of success in the field of oncology in recent decades. It’s a phenomenon that has hugely and positively impacted the lives of most breast cancer patients,” he said at the 2017 European School of Oncology (ESO)/European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO) International Consensus Conference for Advanced Breast Cancer (ABC4) in Lisbon, Portugal.1 “The technology is moving at a very rapid pace, and our ability to measure mutations will get ever cheaper over the next few years.”