21 November 2017 - Allan Brandt, a 63-year-old history of medicine professor at Harvard, seems taken aback to have become part of medical history himself. 

In 2012, he was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukaemia, a deadly cancer that had a potential cure: a bone marrow transplant. His sister was a match, and he went through the two-month-long ordeal twice, only to have the cancer return. "No one is going to do well with a third transplant," he says grimly.

He was saved by a hot biotech trend: medicines that are targeted to a protein made by a particular gene, often discovered by sequencing the cancer's DNA. Sometimes they work in only a small number of people, requiring diagnostic testing. In Brandt's case, Agios Pharmaceuticals, just a 15-minute ride from his Harvard office, had a drug that targeted a genetic mutation he was lucky enough to have. Only a few thousand of the 21,000 people diagnosed with AML each year do.

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