As Toronto Mayor Rob Ford begins chemotherapy for the liposarcoma tumour in his abdomen, doctors may need to try several drugs before they find one that works. But there's hope of better treatments to come in the future through a new technology called "precision medicine."

Cancers are notoriously varied, so even two patients with the very same kind of cancer will respond differently to the same chemotherapy medications. That's because as tumours grow, the genes in the cancer cells mutate in different ways. For every type of cancer, there are different mutations.

Quickly finding the right drugs that will work on these growing tumours is critical, since the side effects of chemotherapy can be devastating.

Now, doctors have found a new way to learn more about the genetics on a patient's tumour, to guide them in their search for the right drug.

A research firm in the U.S. called Champions Oncology developed something it calls Tumorgraft. It takes a small sample of the patient's tumour, and implant them into specialized mice that have been bred without immune systems. The lab then tests different drugs to see which works best on the mice. Since the mice have no immune systems of their own, the researchers can be sure it's the drugs that cause tumours to shrink in some of the mice.

Toronto resident Yaron Panov has undergone precision medicine for the same kind of cancer Ford has: pleomorphic liposarcoma. When Panov was diagnosed in 2010, doctors tried surgery, but the treatment failed and after just three months, the tumour grew back and spread.

Doctors suggested chemotherapy but were not optimistic for Panov's chances.

"I was given just a few months to live," he told CTV News.

Panov's wife, Dr. Rochelle Schwartz, herself a physician, had heard about precision medicine treatments being developed at Champions Oncology and the couple flew to the States.

There, testing on lab mice implanted with Panov's tumour cells revealed that the usual chemotherapy drug that would have been given to Panov would not have worked on him. But a drug developed for colon cancer, on the other hand, showed excellent effectiveness.

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'Precision medicine' offers hope for liposarcoma tumours