Drs. Evers, Smyth discuss personalized medicine

The past decade, Dr. Mark Evers says, has been a revolution.

Thanks to advances in personalized medicine over the past 10 years, Evers says patients today receive treatments that are better tailored to their genetic makeup and specific medical history. Evers, the director of the UK Markey Cancer Center, along with Dr. Susan Smyth, director of the Gill Heart Institute, appeared Sunday on KET’s One to One to discuss personalized medicine.

“Really it has been the last 10 years, I would say, that the revolution has occurred,” Evers said. “I’ve been in this business treating patients for 20 years and now is such an exciting time to be practicing medicine, to be doing research.”

In a wide-ranging conversation with KET’s Bill Goodman, Evers and Smyth discussed how personalized medicine is changing the landscape of cancer and cardiovascular treatments.

Check out some highlights from the interview and be sure to watch the full video.

Smyth on defining personalized medicine

Personalized or precision medicine really means taking as much information about one individual as possible to be able to tailor specific treatments or preventative strategies toward them. So it’s taking their genetic information, taking information from environmental exposures they may have had and putting all of that together in a package that really chooses for that one particular person a best treatment or preventive strategy.

Evers on the pace of personalized treatment advances

I’ve been in this business treating patients for 20 years and now is such an exciting time to be practicing medicine, to be doing research. Because 20 years ago, if a 35-year-old lady came in with colon cancer, she’d be treated the same way as an 85-year-old gentleman. We were very limited in terms of drugs, but it’s only been within the last 10 years, I would say, that there’s been an explosion of techniques, technologies that really have allowed us to … identify biomarkers to be able to treat patients differently.