Here's some good commentary on this case in a blog post "The future of cancer therapy?" from a cancer physician in today's Science-Based Medicine blog:<p><a href="http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/the-future-of-cancer-therapy/" rel="nofollow">http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/the-future-of-...</a><p>"While the story is basically one long anecdote that shows what can be done when new genomic technologies are applied to cancer, it also shows why we are a very long way from the true 'individualization' of cancer care.<p>. . . .<p>"Taking the results of the sequencing of the entire genome and RNAseq data and analyzing them allows scientists to probe the genome and transcriptome of cancers in a way that was never before possible. It produces an enormous amount of data, too, terabytes from a single experiment. At cancer meetings I’ve been to, investigators frequently refer to a 'firehose' of data, petabytes in magnitude. Indeed, the sheer quantity of data from these experiments challenges the bandwidth of universities doing them, and, in fact, it’s not at all uncommon for the preferred means of sending experimental data to be to load up a hard drive with the data and send it by the quaint but effective method of overnight mail to other investigators because it’s faster and more reliable that way. Not surprisingly, serious computing power and major advancements in computer algorithms have been necessary to develop the methods of analyzing data from these experiments.<p>"What I’m trying to convey is that what WUSTL did for Dr. Wartman was not a little deal. It was a big deal that took a lot of resources and effort and likely cost well over $100,000. Apparently it was paid for through research grants, and Dr. Ley claims that no patients were neglected while all that sequencing and computing firepower were transferred to sequencing Dr. Wartman’s cancer genome and transcriptome, having done the same thing for a previous patient."<p>In other words, the glimpse of the future that we may be able to derive from this case shows that the future is still far off, and the steps to reach the future are enormously expensive. More details are available in other paragraphs of the linked Science-Based Medicine post.