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Research Techniques For Better Engineer Medicines Essay

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Introduction

We have decided to research techniques to better engineer medicines. Making medicine more personalized and tailoring them to a patient’s body chemistry can greatly reduce the risk of side effects and can make treatment more efficient. This can be done by using information about the patient’s genetic makeup and where the disease is localized in order to target the infected cells specifically. We have decided to narrow down our research on cancer, specifically leukemia. Cancer can result from any number of genetic mutations and these malfunctions can lead to an unmanageable division of abnormal cells that then leads to the growth and spread of tumors. Leukemia is a type of cancer originating in the bone marrow. Because leukemias are cancers of the blood, it does not create any solid tumors. Instead, the cancerous leukemia cells circulate in the blood, going virtually everywhere. Diagnosis is commonly made by blood tests or bone marrow biopsy. However, it is difficult to detect leukemia early on since patients with slow-growing types of leukemia don’t present with symptoms until much later, making treatment difficult and less effective. Furthermore, the treatments currently being used, for example stem cells transplants, have a number of side effects such as infertility, chronic fatigue, thyroid dysfunction and the probable risk of developing a second cancer. The challenge, therefore, is to modify the means for early detection of cancer, improving personalized

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