HEALTH
BY THE NUMBERS
The world’s second leading cause of death after heart disease and stroke, cancer kills one in six people. It’s a disease that starts at the cell. When a mutation in the genetic code triggers a malfunction in a cell’s genetic machinery, it sometimes begins to replicate out of control, resulting in a tumor. With advances in the technology of reading and manipulating DNA, and artificial intelligence to help interpret genetic information, scientists have developed ways of predicting what drugs will work best on which cancers, known as precision medicine. —Noah Miller