Moneyball Medicine

This week Harry speaks with molecular geneticist Elli Papaemmanuil about how newly available genomic data could lead to major improvements in the standard of care for cancer patients, leading to an age of true precision medicine.Papaemmanuil is an assistant professor of computational oncology at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York. Her lab's research is built around the idea that the genetic sequences of tumor cells reveal distinctive acquired mutations that can allow doctors to predict the course of the disease in specific patients and help them to design individualized treatments. That idea isn't new—but it isn't yet standard practice in oncology, a situation Emmanuil is working to change, in part by using AI and data-driven approaches to analyze the vast number of genetic variations in diseases like leukemia and reduce them to a manageable number of classes amenable to customized treatment approaches.Papaemmanuil says she decided to become a cancer geneticist from the moment she learned abou