Office of Precision Medicine at the Mercy Center for Performance Medicine

At Mercy, a patient diagnosed with cancer no longer receives the exact same treatment as everyone else, thanks to an advanced understanding of how genetic differences can cause people to respond differently to the same treatment.

Precision medicine uses specific information about a person’s cancerous tumor to help make a detailed diagnosis and treatment plan, follow how treatment is working or make a prognosis. Examples of precision medicine include using tumor marker testing to help diagnose cancer and using targeted therapies and immunotherapies to treat specific types of cancer cells, such as HER2-positive breast cancer cells.

Genetic testing for cancer is used to see if someone has indicators that make them more likely to get specific cancer. types. But precision medicine can do more than tell if a patient is at higher risk for cancer. Mercy offers a new test that can screen for cancers already existing in the body. The Multi-Cancer Early Detection (MCED) test can detect cancers for which no current screenings exist. Mercy offers precision medicine that should be performed in addition to routine cancer screenings.

Using pharmacogenomics, a provider can determine which medications will be most successful in helping a specific patient. Pharmacogenomics uses information about an individual's molecular genome to enable providers to tailor drug prescriptions to each patient. The pharmacogenomic process will identify genetic variants that predict which patients may have an adverse reaction to a specific drug and which drugs will be most effective for each patient. Pharmacogenomics is commonly used for behavioral health medications and anticoagulation prescriptions.