Eric Sampson, ASA Journals Manager
Personalized medicine has been in practice “knowingly or unknowingly for a long time” Abdus S. Wahed told attendees of the Central Indiana Chapter’s seminar held June 24, 2011.
Whether it is dosage based on weight, age, or other metrics, or a treatment is chosen based on other factors, doctors have long used personal characteristics to address patients’ conditions. What has changed, noted Wahed, an associate professor in the department of biostatistics at the University of Pittsburgh, “is the rapid development in our knowledge of human genetics.”
And that kicked off a fast-paced, two-hour presentation on dynamic treatment regimes, where treatments are assessed through individually tailored sets of decision rules specifying how treatment options should vary over time.
The concept was illustrated using an oncology example in which patients were randomized to four initial treatment regimes. Most of the patients in the trial also received a second-line treatment, which was chosen adaptively and subjectively, rather than by randomization. Then, the effects on overall survival time of the 16 possible two-stage strategies were evaluated.
Wahed collaborated with Peter Thall of the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center on this seminar, which was held at Eli Lilly and Company and organized by the executive committee of the ASA’s Central Indiana Chapter.
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