Jeanie Lim

Personalized Medicine

Cancer is part of our genetic inheritance. It is not a single disease, but a collection of diseases that have distinct genetic and genomic variability, and diverse prognostic outcomes. However, most cancer treatments and therapies have been designed for the “average patient”, which undermine the genetic complexity of the disease, and genetics variability of individuals. The POLARIS (Personalised OMIC Lattice for Advanced Research and Improving Stratification) initiative in Singapore, much like President Obama’s Precision Medicine Initiative in the US, aims to make medical treatment as individualized as the disease itself. Through the use of next-generation sequencing technologies and genetic analysis tools, POLARIS works to identify genetic, genomic, and clinical information that will enable clinicians to tailor the cancer treatment to the genetic profile of an individual’s tumor for better patient outcomes.