事件记录
面试官: Imagine knowing whether or not your child is at risk for cancer. There would be the possibility to prevent the disease before it even starts. 儿科肿瘤学家. 约书亚Schiffman is part of the first initiative of its kind that promises to do just that.
播音员: Examining the latest research and telling you about the latest breakthroughs, 科学与研究秀在the Scope上播出.
面试官: Dr. 希夫曼，跟我说说你的研究.
Dr. Schiffman: 现在, we've instituted a very large study through Primary Children's Hospital and the department of pediatrics to investigate every new child diagnosed with pediatric cancer in the state of Utah and the surrounding states.
面试官: 哦,真的?
Dr. Schiffman: 这个程序, called the Primary Children's Hospital pediatric cancer program, 是全球范围内的同类吗. We are doing whole-exome sequencing on every child and their parents and, 当适用和可用时, 他们的兄弟姐妹. This enormous unprecedented genomic sequencing effort is all to determine which children are at risk for cancer and why so that we can start to develop unique and effective prevention strategies and hopefully go on to expand this to a global population to 有一天, hopefully prevent childhood cancer.
面试官: 你开始这么做了吗?
Dr. Schiffman: We have started doing that, and we're starting to find some very interesting patterns of inheritance. Also tied into that project is not just genetic risk but trying to understand what are the long term consequences for childhood cancer in terms of late effects, what is the cost of treatment to these children, what are the immediate toxicity of these cancer therapies that we're giving, and what are the pharmacodynamics and pharmacogenetics of these therapies.
大发娱乐希望做什么, 展望未来, is take our genetic information and tie it all together to try to determine is there a genetic risk that we can identify for long term side effects, 有遗传毒性风险, a genetic risk for drug levels in the bloodstream. There's no better place to do that type of work through the department of pediatrics with all of its collaborations and team building.
面试官: 是的. I think an important point of that is this information may not just be beneficial for the patient but for the knowledge of how cancer works and the genetics of cancer.
Dr. Schiffman: 绝对. We are in our initial phases of this pediatric cancer program, and our goal is to build this into something larger in order to take this to the globe around the world. It's not just our children in Utah that we care about. 是每个孩子. I often say that one child diagnosed with cancer is one child too many. Through all of these different genetic efforts, 流行病学的努力, using tools like the Utah population database, we hope to reduce that number to no child diagnosed...
面试官: Can you give a specific example of how that information could help somebody.
Dr. Schiffman: One day if we are successful in identifying who's at genetic risk for cancer, you can imagine that it may be even possible to check a child at birth to see if they've inherited the genetic risk for cancer. 如果是这样的话，可能会有, 有一天,, a drug we could give or a vaccine to intervene before that child develops his or her cancer, or in the very least screen closely so that cancer is identified the moment it begins. There is lots of new technology out there circulating, 肿瘤DNA, 成像, 等等......, where we can try to identify cancers at their earliest stage.
面试官: 这真是令人兴奋.
Dr. Schiffman: It's a very exciting time to be a pediatric oncologist. I should say that in pediatrics, which is how I'm trained, we always talk about prevention. We would rather prevent disease than have to deal with disease after it already develops. 所有 of these genetic and genomic efforts here at the University of Utah in my mind are all to advance that mission of prevention which is so important and is our guiding light in the field of pediatrics.
播音员: Interesting, informative, and all in the name of better health. 大发娱乐是Scope健康科学广播.