Dr. Kurhanewicz's Research: Defining Precision Medicine

Dr. Kurhanewicz’s research is about making the way we treat people more precise. His precision medicine focuses on providing better diagnosis of cancer and enhanced characterization of cancer. His aim is to develop imaging parameters that light up when there is cancer present, and light up to a much brighter degree when the cancer is aggressive. The goal is to look at the whole body and be able to tell the patient the extent of the disease. This is limited with the way we do it pathologically right now, which is with biopsies of regions. With biopsies, there is a sampling error, and you can only sample a very small amount of the tissue. With imaging, they can look at everything, and combine it with biopsies to get a better understanding of the presence, extent, and aggressiveness of the disease.