Northwestern’s Robert H. Lurie Comprehensive Cancer Center is joining forces with the Northwestern Medicine Developmental Therapeutics Institute and Northwestern Memorial Hospital for a new research initiative that aims to provide a personalized treatment program for cancer patients by combining oncology and genomics.

The collaboration, dubbed Northwestern Onco-SET (“Sequence, Evaluate, Treat”), will focus at the outset “on patients with any type of cancer that is not responsive to traditional therapies,” according to a Lurie Center news release.

Care will be personalized through a process known as genomic profiling, in which each patient’s tumor’s genetic profile is sequenced.

“Northwestern Onco-SET will help establish Chicago as a national and international leader in precision medicine for cancer,” said Dr. Leonidas Platanias, director of the Lurie Center, in a news release. “This is the first time cancer treatment in Chicago will be offered in a comprehensive, multidisciplinary program using molecularly defined genomic targets as a basis for determining treatment options including novel early-phase clinical trials.”

The partnership will also collect patients’ individual genomic data for further pre-clinical research conducted by Northwestern Medicine.

“Onco-SET will provide the environment and infrastructure in which we can deliver personalized cancer treatment for patients who currently have very limited options, while accelerating our other research focused on developing novel individually tailored agents,” said Dr. Francis Giles, deputy director of the Lurie Center and director of NMDTI, in the release.

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