Francis Collins Quotes

Although not yet routine, many cancer centers have the technology to sequence some or all of a patient's cancer genome. This can provide massive amounts of valuable information about your cancer, including whether you have genetic mutations and other abnormalities for which new drugs are available.

If you have lung cancer, the most important thing you can know is your genetic code.

We can get much better outcomes from people if we understand the genetic basis of the exact cancer that they have, what interventions might be most effective against it, what's worked in the past and what hasn't.

If there's a seminal discovery in oncology in the last 20 years, it's that idea that cancer genes are often mutated versions of normal genes.

I don't want 100 different cures of cancer. I want, you know, give me five. So if you had, you know, five medicines, you could do away with 90 percent of cancer. That's sort of my objective. I think we're going to do it.

So even though I couldn't bear writing about cancer, I faced it every day.

I think one possibility [in the future] might be chemotherapy. And I'm always hesitant to say that because it makes it sound like I'm against chemotherapy. Right now, chemotherapy is the best cancer treatment therapy we have. But let's say we find some way where we can almost genetically engineer the DNA of our being and fight cancer that way. Then, the idea that we used to pump poison into people to fight off cancer will almost seem like the use of leeches or something.

In 15 years, we've raised $225 million, sequenced the myeloma genome, and opened 45 trials of 23 drugs - six approved by the FDA - which have doubled the life span of multiple myeloma patients. I've taken both Velcade and Revlimid, which we helped develop.

Every cancer looks different. Every cancer has similarities to other cancers. And we're trying to milk those differences and similarities to do a better job of predicting how things are going to work out and making new drugs.

By acquiring Biovex, we're continuing the transformation of Amgen into a company that supports therapeutic oncology as well as supportive care oncology.

There are certain mutations you can find across cancers in different organs.

If you sequence a cancerous tumor, you should be able to tailor the therapy according to the root cause of the cancer. But it has taken so long to do the sequencing - which also requires time to prepare the samples and interpret the deluge of data that comes out - that the patients are already undergoing therapy by the process if over.

Say you have cancer - you have this broad thing we call cancer; we're going to irradiate you and pump this poisonous material into you and hope more of the bad stuff dies than the good. That is going to seem so medieval when we can fix it on a genetic level, and Foundation Medicine is the first step to diagnosing it on a genetic level.

A breast cancer might turn out to have a close resemblance to a gastric cancer. And this kind of reorganization of cancer in terms of its internal genetic anatomy has really changed the way we treat and approach cancer in general.

Breast cancer isn't one disease - it's probably four or five different types, and without knowing what type a person has, you can't optimize treatment for them.

I had a ringside seat to cancer. As have most people.

Applying smarter IT to genomic data may offer the potential to cure many types of cancer and other diseases.

We can end cancer as we know it.

It's possible, although far-fetched, that in the future we could think of cancer being used as a therapy.

Cancer is a disease that is mysterious, headstrong and makes its own rules. And mine, to this date, is incurable.

If I could get every single cancer genome sequence that has been sequenced; if I could ever put it in one repository, we have the capacity to do a million billion calculations per second. We'll be able to find out more in 10 minutes more than it would take 10 Nobel laureates 10 years to find out about the patterns of cancer and the cures for cancer.

Cancer is a word, not a sentence.

Fighting cancer is my mission right now. The research and development of finding cures for this nasty disease is my passion.

I don't think we will find a cure for all cancers in the next 50 years let alone 20. I think it's foolishness to say that.

Once you are diagnosed with cancer, time changes. It both speeds up insanely and stops altogether.