Kansas City hospitals and research labs are betting that the next era of medicine will not be one-size-fits-all. Across the metro, teams at KU Medical Center, Children's Mercy, the Stowers Institute and UMKC are exploring genomics, artificial intelligence and lab-grown tissue models in the broader field of precision medicine, an approach that uses advanced technology to match therapies to a person's specific biology.
The most ambitious piece of that effort involves theranostics, an approach that can bring together radiopharmaceutical production, molecular imaging, radiopharmaceutical therapy and clinical trials under one roof, according to Kansas City Magazine.
Nuclear medicine technology is relevant to the use of radiopharmaceuticals.
BAMF Health, a Michigan-based company, already operates a flagship facility. Prostate cancer sits on the theranostics development list for the new Kansas City effort, according to the same Kansas City Magazine account. Cancer-incidence data can be examined by age group, race and year of diagnosis, including childhood cancer.
How Radioactive Drugs Already Reshaped Prostate Cancer Care
The regulatory groundwork for this kind of therapy has been building for years. The FDA granted its first approval for Pluvicto, a targeted radioligand drug for metastatic prostate cancer, in March 2022, and expanded that approval to PSMA-positive metastatic hormone-sensitive prostate cancer in July 2026, according to MINUTE Medical. Other therapies remain under study.
The stakes for expanding beyond cancer are steep. Alzheimer's disease and dementia remain areas of concern. Diagnosis is an important part of addressing those conditions.
Screening a Thousand Drug Compounds in a KU Lab
At KU Medical Center, Jeffrey Holzbeierlein leads a research team studying the causes of prostate and bladder cancer and the chemotherapeutic treatments used against them. His lab has screened more than 1,000 drug compounds created at KU, and several of those compounds are now moving into clinical trials, according to Kansas City Magazine. Precision medicine, Holzbeierlein's work suggests, targets the genetic drivers of tumors rather than treating cancer as a single disease, since cancer cells may express unique cell-surface markers that enable more targeted treatment.
Cancer medicine is a rapidly changing field.
Growing Miniature Organs to Test Drugs Before Patients Do
Organoids are a strategy for studying disease, with drug therapies tested in a petri dish rather than in a person first.
Scott Younger, director of disease gene engineering at the Genomic Medicine Center within Children's Mercy Hospital, described the models. Organoids are grown in a dish. One area of focus is ADHD medication response: a study found that half the children studied responded quickly and sustained that response, while another group did not respond to the medication at all. The platform may be useful for studying differences in medication response, and organoids more broadly may help identify the best medication for a particular patient. Separately, organoid research is also being applied to epilepsy.
A Child's Genome as a Care Blueprint
A child's genome blueprint could help design that child's entire care strategy, according to Kansas City Magazine's reporting. That vision builds on infrastructure already running at Children's Mercy, which operates the Genomic Answers for Kids research repository — an effort aiming to collect genomic data from 30,000 children and their families, building toward nearly 100,000 genomes, and which has already surpassed 2,000 rare disease diagnoses using advanced whole-genome sequencing, per Children's Mercy. Pediatric cancer research also considers genomic profiling and circulating tumor DNA.
The Digital and Institutional Backbone
Much of this work is coordinated among Kansas City institutions. The Digital Health Co/Lab, a collaboration between KU Medical Center, The University of Kansas Health System and the University of Kansas, focuses on AI-guided digital therapeutics and diagnostics; per KU Medical Center, the effort — formerly known as the Center for Health Innovation and Transformative Care — organizes its work around enabled devices, digital therapeutics and diagnostics, and tech-centric providers.
UMKC is also part of the region's technology landscape. The Stowers Institute, founded in 1994 by American Century Investments founder Jim Stowers Jr. and his wife Virginia after both survived cancer, opened its 600,000-square-foot Kansas City research facility in 2000 on the former Menorah Medical Center campus, endowed with nearly $2 billion in personal wealth, according to Wikipedia. Stowers researchers also developed an AI tool to help predict how cells choose their future, per the Stowers Institute, letting scientists model cellular changes computationally rather than through extensive lab trial-and-error.
The regional push also has an economic development dimension. KC BioHub, a program of BioNexus KC, is part of that regional effort. The program coordinates regional biomanufacturing and precision medicine investment across the area's research institutions. The planned theranostics hub also fits a broader regional push: the U.S. Economic Development Administration says the Kansas City BioSecure Manufacturing Tech Hub seeks to position eastern Kansas and western Missouri as a global leader in advanced biomanufacturing.
Why Pediatric Precision Medicine Has Lagged
Extending this kind of targeted therapy to children marks a notable shift. Regulatory considerations also shape efforts to serve both adult and pediatric patients. Pediatric precision medicine raises distinct policy questions.
Pediatric cancer incidence and leukemia incidence remain important measures in population health.
The work described above spans genomics, molecular biology, artificial intelligence and advanced imaging to identify treatments once considered years away. Whether the physical infrastructure for the theranostics center gets built on the timeline partners have described, and how quickly organoid screening moves from the lab bench to actual patient treatment protocols, remains to be seen.
