How Wisconsin Is Creating the Future of Precision Medicine

Frederica Freyberg:
In medical news, Wisconsin learned this week it has been named as one of 12 technology hubs for the biohealth industry, and with that designation comes nearly $50 million over the next five years. The focus is on personalized or precision medicine and as “Here & Now’s” Steven Potter reports, Wisconsin is front and center on efforts to advance precision medicine.

Megan Haensgen:
I love this machine.

Steven Potter:
A couple of years ago, when she was 43, Megan Haensgen had a doctor’s appointment.

Megan Haensgen:
Went in and saw that colorectal surgeon. He sat down, looked me square in the face and said, “I’m almost 100% certain you have anal cancer.” And I argued. I said, “No, I’m here for my hemorrhoid.” And he gave me a minute and then I realized what he was saying. So that was the start of the journey. They did a biopsy in the office that day. Everything was very quick, rushed, definitely felt a sense of urgency. I knew I’d been walking around with cancer for several years, so I was really scared.

Steven Potter:
She asked doctors if her cancer treatment could be done close to home.

Megan Haensgen:
And they said, “No. We feel strongly that this is where you need to be.”

Steven Potter:
She had her treatment done at the Froedtert Hospital campus in Milwaukee, using the Radixact Radiation therapy machine. It’s designed to deliver cancer-killing beams of energy to a very focused area. And given the sensitive spot of Haensgen’s cancer and the proximity to the rest of her digestive system, that’s exactly what she needed.

Megan Haensgen:
As a patient, you want as targeted of a therapy as you can get, so you don’t damage healthy tissue, and so you can spare, you know, your quality of life.

Steven Potter:
That kind of precision, tailor-made treatment based on the individual patient’s conditions, ailments and body needs is known as precision or personalized medicine. And researchers say it’s the wave of the medical future.

Muhammad Murtaza:
Every patient is a unique individual. They have their own genetics, their own exposures, the environment that they have been in. And so precision medicine is this approach that could we actually learn more about each individual patient so that each patient gets the right drug at the right time?

Steven Potter:
Dr. Muhammad Murtaza is the associate director of the Center for Human Genomics and Precision Medicine at UW-Madison. Another major component of precision medicine, he says, is looking at a patient’s DNA. Doctors like Murtaza work to explore how precision medicine can develop treatments for patients with ailments like asthma, COPD, kidney disease and of course, cancer.

Muhammad Murtaza:
How do you optimize the dose of their therapy based on their genetic makeup? So not just the makeup of their cancer, but actually their genetic makeup that they were born with.

Steven Potter:
Murtaza says we’ve barely scratched the surface of what these new medical advancements can do.

Muhammad Murtaza:
What I see precision medicine interacting with a lot more is new advances in data science and artificial intelligence and machine learning which can help us really make sense of this data and then make better clinical decisions.

Steven Potter:
But precision medicine isn’t just research and patient treatment. It’s also big business. A number of Wisconsin companies are poised to be the lead innovators in this medical revolution.

Daniel Biank:
Very precise, submillimeter accurate radiation.

Steven Potter:
One of them is a company called Accuray, which moved its headquarters to southern Wisconsin last year.

Daniel Biank:
Accuray has three products: the CyberKnife, the Radixact, which is also the former TomoTherapy, which originated here in Wisconsin and then the precision planning software where the doctors pull in MRI and CT images and they literally paint on the image where do they want to radiate and then the areas that they want to protect from radiation.

Steven Potter:
Accuray is one of many other precision and personalized medicine companies operating in the state.

Daniel Biank:
We have leaders in genomics, like Exact Science for diagnostics, Illumina for DNA sequencing. And then we have this supply chain that’s built around Plexus and Rockwell, where we actually manufacture and make things here. And then we have the clinical institutions like UW, the Medical College of Wisconsin. So within Wisconsin, we have the whole ecosystem of what we are calling the invent, build and deploy life cycle for personalized medicine.

Steven Potter:
Because of this network of companies, the federal government recently designated Wisconsin as a biohealth technology hub, which may also mean an influx of money. Lisa Johnson is the chief executive officer at BioForward, the state’s biohealth industry association. She explains the objective behind the designation.

Lisa Johnson:
To fund tech hubs throughout the country in key technology areas where the United States needs to become more competitive.

Steven Potter:
The program also brings together partnerships for data collection with the intent to benefit patients.

Lisa Johnson:
That data collection that really guides now our physicians, but also certainly our innovators on where what kind of drugs should be brought to market. It’s certainly — we get that data from medical imaging, from our diagnostics to really guide where we should go with our drugs in the future.

Daniel Biank:
Personalized medicine is about the right treatment for the right patient at the right time. So the goal is to give them effective care, but also not to give them unnecessary care where they’re going through unnecessary procedures, unnecessary tests. It may be having side effects that, that they don’t need to face, but to really match them with what’s going to address their disease.

Steven Potter:
For patients like Haensgen, who is now cancer free after chemotherapy and laser-focused radiation, precision and personalized medicine made a life altering difference. She hopes the advancements continue.

Megan Haensgen:
Even since the three years that I’ve been treated, I know that my doctors and my team at my hospital on this machine are doing things a little differently, and that’s just in the last three years. So I can only imagine that research and innovation just will improve going forward to make things even better for future cancer patients and future generations.

Steven Potter:
For “Here & Now, I’m Steven Potter.