The Rise of Precision Medicine
By Sanjana PB
Precision medicine, also known as personalized medicine, is a field of healthcare that is currently on the rise and is on a path to becoming extremely widespread. It seeks to maximize the quality of healthcare by individualizing the preventative and treatment processes to each patient's uniquely evolving health status. This individualization is aided by computationally integrating all of the patient’s medical data and making it easily accessible to researchers and medical professionals. It is envisaged that in the near future, as full clinical omic integration occurs, electronic and computed health records will become virtual data clouds, containing billions of data points on each individual patient (Duffy, 2015).
The endeavor in precision medicine spans a broad range of scientific areas including, but not limited to drug discovery, genetics, genomics, health communication, and causal inference, all in support of evidence-based and data-driven decision-making (Kosorok & Laber, 2019). The concept of ‘Precision Medicine’ vows to achieve a shift to future healthcare systems with a more proactive and predictive approach to medicine, where the emphasis is on disease prevention rather than the treatment of symptoms (Duffy, 2015).
With the field of genetics gaining substantial attention, and with abundant research being conducted in gene discovery and genomics in the recent past, the expectations of fruitful results with the employment of precision medicine have been raised concerning its impact on biomedicine and in pushing forward a new understanding of disease biology.
Several targeted treatments are emerging, some with considerable sophistication and individual-level tailoring (Sisodiya, 2020), thereby customizing the medical practice based on the use of genetic tests, identification of biomarkers, and development of targeted drugs. We no longer have to rely on the “one-size-fits-all” medical approach to the prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of diseases as it seems inefficient and inadequate compared to precision medicine. This also eliminates the potential danger hazards involved in consuming drugs that might not agree with a particular patient’s medical conditions and genetics.
Precision medicine is rapidly being embraced by biomedical researchers, pioneering clinicians, and scientific funding programs. It poses promises to revolutionize patient care and treatment decisions.
However, many of the promises of precision medicine remain unfulfilled. Though there has been undeniably huge progress in the knowledge of the molecular mechanisms of diseases and in the development of drugs that have significantly impacted the treatment of some types of cancer, there is no evidence that this same pattern will be replicated in other complex diseases. Precision medicine is expected to make incremental developments in specific areas of medicine, but there are obstacles to this generalization (Iriart, 2019).
Adding on, the expensive costs of new biotechnologies can exacerbate health inequalities and act as a hindrance to the sustainability of health services, especially in low and middle-income countries. Providing more priority and emphasis to precision medicine can deflect the funds away from less costly inventions that have a greater impact on public health.
Thus, we can only hope to see further advancements in the future that will make this more relevant to various types of diseases and accessible to different groups of people. But in general, and as a whole, the idea of precision medicine stands to be futuristic and unique.
Works Cited
Duffy, D. J. (2015). Problems, challenges and promises: perspectives on precision medicine. Briefings in Bioinformatics, 17(3), 494–504. https://doi.org/10.1093/bib/bbv060
Iriart, J. a. B. (2019, March 25). Precision medicine/personalized medicine: a critical analysis of movements in the transformation of biomedicine in the early 21st century. https://www.scielo.br/j/csp/a/MDnkgxSFz89BSRM45zhNM3D/?lang=en
Kosorok, M. R., & Laber, E. B. (2019). Precision medicine. Annual Review of Statistics and Its Application, 6(1), 263–286. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-statistics-030718-105251
Sisodiya, S. M. (2020). Precision medicine and therapies of the future. Epilepsia, 62(S2). https://doi.org/10.1111/epi.16539