Personalized medicine is a medical model emphasizing in general the customization of healthcare, with all decisions and practices being tailored to individual patients in whatever ways possible. Recently, this has mainly involved the systematic use of genetic or other information about an individual patient to select or optimize that patient's preventative and therapeutic care.
Over the past century, medical care has centered on standards of care based on epidemiological studies of large cohorts. However, large cohort studies do not take into account the genetic variability of individuals within a population. Personalized medicine seeks to provide an objective basis for consideration of such individual differences. Traditionally, personalized medicine has been limited to the consideration of a patient's family history, social circumstances, environment and behaviors in tailoring individual care.
Advances in a number of molecular profiling technologies, including proteomic profiling, metabolomic analysis, and genetic testing, may allow for a greater degree of personalized medicine than is currently available. Information about a patient's proteinaceous, genetic and metabolic profile could be used to tailor medical care to that individual's needs. A key attribute of this medical model is the development of companion diagnostics, whereby molecular assays that measure levels of proteins, genes or specific mutations are used to provide a specific therapy for an individual's condition by stratifying disease status, selecting the proper medication and tailoring dosages to that patient's specific needs. Additionally, such methods can be used to assess a patient's risk factor for a number of conditions and tailor individual preventative treatments.
Since about 2007 the term Stratified medicine has been used for the current approach.
Examples of successful personalized treatments exist in the field of oncology. Measurements of erbB2 and EGFR proteins in breast, lung and colorectal cancer patients are taken before selecting proper treatments. Since current cancer treatment boasts of Adjuvant therapy1 in many cases, It can be assumed that Bio-markers are going to play a major role in these diagnostics and treatments. Most lethal Cancer patients have an extremely poor prognosis. In the absence of effective screening methods, considerable efforts have been made during the past decade to identify better systemic treatments2.
In 2003, the completion of the human genome project gave us an unprecedented amount of genetic information. In my next post, I will be discussing Next Generation sequencing technology and it's impact on Personalized medicine. It's more advanced and in use than what you can imagine. Just think it as I am talking about mobile phones in 1980s.
1.Adjuvant Therapy: Additional cancer treatment given after the primary treatment to lower the risk that the cancer will come back. Adjuvant therapy may include chemotherapy, radiation therapy, hormone therapy, targeted therapy, or biological therapy.
2.Advanced pancreatic carcinoma: current treatment and future challenges
Anastasios Stathis & Malcolm J. Moore
Nature Reviews Clinical Oncology 7, 163-172 (March 2010)
2 comments:
i hardly know much about Bio... but can say, if treatment can be taken to this extent... THEN ITS WONDERFUL !!
It's always good to share new technologies, Although it's very costly and in Infancy, it truly holds potential for future Healthcare since these techlogy follows moore's law too
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