Dr Michael Wang on the Coming Precision Medicine Era in Mantle Cell Lymphoma

The next era in treating mantle cell lymphoma will use precision medicine to target therapies in a personalized way, said Michael Wang, MD, professor in the Department of Lymphoma and Myeloma at MD Anderson.

Transcript

How have next-generation sequencing and assessments of minimal residual disease changed how MCL is treated?

I really think the therapy for mantle cell lymphoma has migrated from the chemotherapy era to the targeted therapy era now to the cell therapy era. But what if in the future when you give all these therapies, you still are not able to cure some patients? In other words, you are going to face some patients in the clinic who got all the therapies—targeted, chemo, cell therapies—and they still have disease. “Dr Wang, what are you going to do this time?”

I really think the next era is going to be the precision medicine era. The precision medicine era is not all about the sequencing, but indeed it started with the sequencing. Both DNA and RNA, and epigenetics, and also in the future proteomics. Now, sequencing is not all part of precision medicine. You have to have biomechanism studies and to find out, using sequencing and the biomechanism studies, find out the resistance mechanism in each particular patient. And then you can deliver the therapy directly to kill the Achilles’ heel of the cancer.

And I really think in the future, sequencing is going to be ubiquitous. It should be on every patient. It should be utilized with the biomechanisms for precision medicine in a personalized manner.