Precision medicine has been a buzzword across the medical field for over a decade. But what does it really mean for cancer care and how is it influencing new therapies for patients? Initially, precision cancer medicine focused on targeting specific mutated genes. We thought that understanding the genetic mutations of a tumor would help us develop targeted drugs that would solve the problem, one broken gene at a time.

What we found instead is that when you build an inventory of all the broken parts in cancer, the number of mutational patterns that could give rise to cancer is larger than the number of atoms in the universe.

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