Russian scientists are working on personalized cancer drugs based on the patient's DNA

Russian scientists are working to create personalized cancer drugs that will be developed taking into account the patient's DNA.

At this stage, creating an individual drug for each patient is an expensive process that requires large amounts of computation.

Leading biologists and doctors, together with mathematicians, are developing platforms that reduce the cost and speed up the process of creating personalized medicines.

MOSCOW, September 30 - RIA Novosti. Russian scientists are working on personalized cancer drugs; such drugs will be created taking into account the patient’s DNA and will become a breakthrough in medicine, said the head of the Russian Academy of Sciences Gennady Krasnikov in an interview with RIA Novosti.

“Nowadays the priority is a personalized approach, the creation of individual drugs. To treat a person for a particular type of cancer, it is necessary, of course, to select drugs individually. That is, we must actually completely decipher the DNA of a given patient, look at proteomics, and a drug is selected for this,” said the academician.

Proteomics is a branch of molecular biology that deals with the comprehensive study of proteins. The proteome is the complete set of proteins in a cell and changes under various conditions and diseases.

At the same time, according to Krasnikov, making medicine for each patient at this stage is very expensive and requires large amounts of calculations. “And today, our leading biologists and doctors, together with mathematicians involved in machine learning methods, are developing platforms that reduce the cost and, most importantly, speed up the process,” explained the head of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

To begin with, large databases are created with the results of studies of patients suffering from a specific disease. These databases must be formatted correctly and the necessary correlations must be found as quickly as possible, the academician pointed out. “When this is put into production, we will be able to quickly and effectively select so-called personalized medicine, personalized medicines for each person,” Krasnikov added.

Thus, great preparation is underway for the use of individual drugs that will specifically work according to the body’s needs. “Vaccines are now being tested, for example, against skin cancer and other types of tumors - and this is just the beginning. And then we are waiting for breakthrough work in an individual approach to each patient,” said the head of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

The timing of creating such drugs for a specific disease will depend on the accumulation of the necessary databases, he concluded.