HarvardJustOutWithArticle on field of Precision Medicine
Targeting Cancer The dawn of precision medicine
LINNEA OLSON tells her story—of repeatedly facing death, then being saved by the latest precision therapy—articulately and thoughtfully, agreeing to discuss subjects that might otherwise be too personal, she says, because it could benefit other patients. She lives in an artist cooperative in Lowell, Massachusetts, in an industrial space, together with her possessions and artwork, which fill most of an expansive high-ceilinged room. Olson is tall, with close-cropped, wavy blonde hair, and dresses casually in faded blue jeans. Although she has an open, informal style, this is paired with a natural dignity and a deliberate manner of speaking.
“I had a young doctor who was very good,” she begins. “I presented with shortness of breath and a cough, and also some strange weakness in my upper body. And he ordered a chest x-ray.” Years later, she saw in her chart that he had written, “On the off chance that this young, non-smoking woman has a neoplasm”—the beginnings of a tumor in her left lung. But he didn’t mention that to her, and “he ended up getting killed on 9/11—he was on one of the planes that hit the towers.”
The national tragedy thus rippled into Olson’s life. Never suspecting that her symptoms could be caused by cancer, she spent the next several years seeking a diagnosis. A string of local doctors told her it was adult-onset asthma, hypochondria, then pneumonia. When antibiotics didn’t clear the pneumonia, a CT scan showed a five-centimeter mass in her left lung: an infection? Or cancer? It was the first time she had heard that word. The technicians told her that at 45, she was too young for that. But a biopsy confirmed the diagnosis. “In 2005, when you told someone they had lung cancer,” a doctor later told her, “you were basically saying you were sorry.” Her youngest son was seven at the time. Olson wanted to live.
Now, 13 years later, she is alive and healthy, a testament to the potential of precision medicine to extend lives. But like precision medicine itself, her story encapsulates the best and worst of what medicine can offer, as converging forces in genetics, data science, patient autonomy, health policy, and insurance reimbursement shape its future. There are miraculous therapies and potentially deadly side effects; tantalizing quests for cures that come at increasingly high costs; extraordinary advances in basic science, despite continuing challenges in linking genes implicated in disease to biological functions; inequities in patient care and clinical outcomes; and a growing involvement of patients in their own care, as they share experiences, emotions, and information with a global online community, and advocate for their own well-being.
Most articles on this field are very new, the field in new. I like companies in new fields, having been in such companies its easier than stale old industries, less competition.
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