clinical focus
Cures from within
Professor Matthew Cook, director of Canberra Clinical Genomics. Photo: ANU
Faster, cheaper methods of gene sequencing
have opened the doors to a centre for
personalised medicine that promises better
diagnoses and more precise treatments.
Matthew Cook interviewed by Dallas Bastian
T
he ACT Government recently announced $7.3 million in
funding for a centre that will allow researchers and doctors
to explore personalised medicine.
The ACT minister for health, Simon Corbell, says the centre,
called Canberra Clinical Genomics, will give Canberrans access to
new, personally tailored healthcare treatments.
The facility will be a partnership between the Australian National
University and ACT Health and will work to cure patients with
complex diseases by sequencing their genomes and finding
treatments personalised to their condition.
“This new service will help clinicians manage patients with
immunological disease and other complex [ailments], through
medicines tailored to the individual,” Corbell says. “By providing
a locally available genomics and genetic pathology service, we
are helping our doctors tailor care to the individual needs of
their patients with personalised medicines, which also has the
potential to reduce the number of tests necessary to reach a
diagnosis for patients.”
28 agedcareinsite.com.au
Corbell says the new centre will build on the work the John
Curtin School of Medical Research’s Centre for Personalised
Immunology is already carrying out to build and develop
genomics as part of a clinical and diagnostic service in partnership
with ACT Pathology.
The personalised immunology centre was established in 2014
with the aim of improving services for people who have immune
diseases by discovering causative genetic variation in order to
deliver individualised treatment strategies.
“Jurisdictions across Australia are working on strategies for the
implementation of genomics into clinical practice and this funding
for a service here in Canberra puts us at the cutting edge of these
exciting new clinical opportunities,” Corbell says.
The director of the centre, professor Matthew Cook from
the ANU Medical School and Curtin, said the new genomics
centre would enable doctors and researchers to collaborate to
implement “what is truly 21st-century medicine”.
Cook sits down with Aged Care Insite to discuss the new centre,
the role personalised medicine may play in the future and what
still needs to be established in this space.
ACI: The Canberra Clinical Genomics facility will allow you to
genotype. What is genotyping?
MC: Genotyping is a term that refers simply to decoding and
describing the genetic sequence of a gene in a particular individual.
Our genetic makeup is extremely complex. Each of us has about
23,000 genes that encode proteins, and even that accounts for only