Author: Lori L. Burrows, Professor of Biocchemistry and Biomedical Sciences, McMaster University

Personalized medicine describes a treatment tailored to one or a few individuals who have potentially deadly health conditions, such as cancer that no longer responds to chemotherapy, or an infection resistant to multiple antibiotics. Although personalized medicine is promising, it is labour-intensive and expensive, and the pathways for its regulatory approval and reimbursement are complicated, since the small number of patients who qualify limits the design of clinical trials. Here we use recent examples of chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapy for relapsed cancers, and bacteriophage (phage) therapy for antibiotic-resistant bacterial infections, to show how Canadians could benefit from these…