Personalised Drug Selection for Cancer Treatment in Qatar

Cancer is now the number one cause of death in Qatar. Despite a remarkable series of changes made over the last decade, the discovery and development of new medicines is still a complex process – hugely expensive in terms of money and time. The treatment of cancer usually uses targeted drugs to kill malignant cells, and/or tumour-growth inhibitors in an attempt to selectively target and kill tumorous cells. The latter usually involves a scheme called ‘targeted therapy’, where anti-cancer drugs are directed against cancer-specific molecules and signalling pathways. These are designed to interfere with a specific molecular target, usually a protein that plays a crucial role in tumour cell growth and proliferation. Different patients can have very different response to a drug that is conventionally prescribed uniformly without taking into account their personal genetic characteristics. Breast cancer is the most common cancer in Qatar; only a small subset of patients shows significant therapeutic benefit from trastuzumab treatment, who harbour specific HER2 mutations. By examining genetic differences among individuals and administering drugs targeted at those differences, drug efficacy can be improved dramatically for sub-groups of patients who share common traits. Personalized medicine would improve the quality of life for each patient by using drugs tailored to their individual genome. We aim to make such treatment a possibility, by developing an informatics platform to support the routine use of personalised computational simulation to calculate the performance of a set of available drugs before they are administered. Molecular level computer simulation will be used to create a patient specific cancer model which will take into account the genetic makeup of an individual to be treated. Working with Dr Valentin Ilyin at CMU-Q, Dr Ussama Al Homsi at HMC, and other colleagues from local hospitals, subgroups of patients will be identified who are most likely to respond well to a particular drug treatment. A personalized drug therapy will then be chosen which maximizes treatment efficacy for an individual. This will require potentially hundreds of high performance computing simulations to be performed for each patient. Our informatics infrastructure will take care of the management and storage of large scale, potentially identifiable patient data, using that data to build computational models, and interfacing with the high performance computational resources required to execute simulations and analyse the results.