Center for Personalized Diagnostic Medicine Brings Next Generation of Sequencing to Melanoma Screening

Christine Wilson, cancer survivor, shares her experiences from the Abramson Cancer Center’s 2013- Focus Melanoma and CAN Prevent Skin Cancer Conferences. In this blog, she discusses personalized medicine and melanoma.

Dr. David Elder, MD, a pathologist noted that the newly formed Penn Center for Personalized Diagnostic Medicine will utilize a new gene panel that screens for 41 different gene mutations that can be found in malignant melanomas. This next generation screening can be done with a smaller amount of DNA than the more limited gene screening techniques required in the past. This is significant because it will allow doctors to use new therapies at earlier stages of the disease, focusing on patients who are at high risk for recurrence rather than waiting for the melanoma to metastasize and treating it a more advanced stage.

The Center for Personalized Diagnostics (CPD), a joint initiative by Penn Medicine's Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine and the Abramson Cancer Center, integrates Molecular Genetics, Pathology Informatics, and Genomic Pathology for individualized patient diagnoses and to elucidate cancer treatment options for physicians.

The focus of the CPD's initial efforts has been toward developing two cancer gene sequencing panels: a custom hematologic malignancy panel and a solid tumor panel. The primary targets will include leukemia, and solid tumors, beginning with brain, melanoma, and lung tumors. The goal is to identify genomic alterations that allow clinicians to design and implement optimal treatment plans.