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Cancer Preparedness: Why Your Doctor Wishes You Had Sequenced Your Genome Years Ago

When someone is diagnosed with cancer, the treatment clock starts immediately. Every day matters. And increasingly, the most effective treatments require one thing that takes weeks to obtain from scratch: the patient's complete genome.

The timeline problem

Personalized cancer treatment — including mRNA vaccines, targeted therapies, and immunotherapy drug selection — requires comparing the tumor's DNA against the patient's healthy baseline genome. If that baseline doesn't exist, it has to be sequenced from scratch. That process takes 3-6 weeks. In a cancer scenario where median survival might be months, those weeks are precious.

The MHC bottleneck

Designing a personalized cancer vaccine also requires knowing the patient's MHC profile to predict which tumor fragments the immune system can recognize. MHC typing adds additional time to the workflow. With a pre-stored genome that includes MHC data, this entire step collapses to a database lookup.

The asymmetry of preparedness

Sequencing your genome today costs $199 and takes minutes of your time. Not having it when you need it costs weeks of treatment delay during the most critical period of your life. The math is simple — and it's the reason oncologists increasingly recommend proactive genome sequencing for patients with family history of cancer.

Related: MHC Typing Explained · Genome Readiness for Families · View Pricing

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