A doctor at Weill Cornell Medical Center is leading the way in targeted treatments for certain types of cancer.

Dr. Ari Melnick is a professor of oncology at Weill Cornell Medical Center, and is considered one of Weill Cornell’s preeminent researchers on the new frontier of personalized medicine.

He was one of the first scientists to look into epigenomics, the study of chemical reactions that control the activities of genes.

His goal is bringing the most advanced treatments in leukemia and lymphoma to patients.
Melnick says cells are controlled by instructions, not unlike how a computer controls software.

“All the information that codes for how all cells behave, cancer cells and normal cells, is contained in that layer of instructions,” Dr. Melnick said. “To understand in each individual person how the tumor behaves, we have to read those instructions.”

Melnick’s lab works on reading and decoding chemical reactions in the hopes they can find ways to essentially erase or rewrite those instructions, to avoid generating cancer cells.

“That’s where reading individual patients is fundamentally important for tailoring treatment more precisely to the given biology of an individual patient’s tumor.”

He says with the right targeted therapy, even terrible, fatal cancers can be curable.