OTTAWA The Ottawa Hospital is looking to gain a foothold in the fast-growing field of personalized medicine, which involves using gene sequencing to help doctors predict which drugs would work best for a particular patient.

The hospital has drawn up plans to set up a molecular diagnostics lab with the technology to decode hundreds of genes, or even the entire genomes of patients, which could yield new approaches for treating cancer and other serious diseases.

Details of the plan are still being worked out, and no funding has yet been committed to the project. The hospital is looking to raise $380,000 in seed money to get the lab off the ground. Another $1 million would have to be raised to buy the gene-sequencing equipment.

Hospital officials say the lab would mark a key step in making the relatively new technology of DNA sequencing a standard part of medical care. It would also position the hospital for an emerging field in which the medical establishment has placed great hope: studying entire genomes all of a patients DNA and identifying every mutation involved in a particular disease.

Experts say the approach would enable treatments to be customized to an individual patients genetic profile, which is miles away from the traditional trial-and-error method of giving every patient the same drugs in the hope of benefiting the fortunate few.

Down the road, the hospital wants to establish a teaching program that would train a new generation of pathologists with the skills to practise personalized medicine.

This is a very realistic vision, and I want Ottawa to be positioned as a provincial centre of excellence for molecular diagnostics, said Paula Doering, the hospitals vice-president of clinical programs.

Currently, the use of gene sequencing is most advanced in cancer care. Doctors use the information to guide more precise treatment, or to tailor drugs to the genetic traits of patients, with the goal of giving them a better chance of survival.

The idea is to avoid wasting precious time and money on potentially ineffective treatments, which expose countless patients to harmful side effects and inflate the nations drug spending.

Of the 7,000 cancer patients who are treated annually at The Ottawa Hospital, a high proportion receive testing for selective genes or chemical markers, especially if they have certain types of breast, lung, colorectal or gastrointestinal cancer, said Dr. David Stewart, the hospitals head of medical oncology.

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Ottawa Hospital eyes expansion into cutting-edge ‘molecular medicine’