Precision medicine refers to customized healthcare that addresses each person’s biology and life circumstances, with the goal of anticipating, preventing, and treating disease.
Scientists who followed Mila’s development foresee a future where doctors will have access to treatments tailored specifically to each patient’s genetic makeup.
Personalized Medicine
As healthcare advances advance, healthcare is shifting towards personalized medicine – offering personalized treatments based on each person’s genetic makeup and unique genetic profile.
An individual’s genetic mutations could help inform their cancer treatment plan and enable physicians to select more effective drugs with reduced side effects associated with traditional chemotherapy drugs.
Personalized medicine can play an essential role in disease prevention by identifying susceptibilities to diseases. This allows tailored prevention strategies that lower healthcare costs while simultaneously improving outcomes.
Precision medicine’s success depends on two things: its science and how accessible it is. That is why more of our organization’s resources are dedicated towards addressing barriers preventing people from accessing tests and products driving this movement, such as costs or access barriers; especially among those living on low incomes.
Biomarkers
Precision medicine takes into account all of the intricate details that define each patient individually, taking into account genes, proteins and other factors to better understand why certain conditions occur in that person’s life and provide for more targeted diagnosis and treatments.
Biomarkers are objectively measured biological traits that indicate disease or drug response, such as genetic markers, physiological signs, chemical levels in blood or imaging characteristics.
Noninvasive imaging biomarkers like magnetic resonance imaging and positron emission tomography can be used as non-invasive biomarkers to monitor, diagnose, evaluate the effectiveness of treatment programs or serve as surrogate endpoints in clinical trials. With measurable digital markers as a part of personalized healthcare delivery for each individual patient.
As the National Institutes of Health’s All of Us Research Program continues to assemble data from millions of people, we must pay equal attention to integrating digital biomarkers into clinical workflows – this will present its own set of challenges; yet doing so could unlock precision medicine’s full potential.
Data
Healthcare systems across the world are increasingly searching for effective strategies to combat complex disease comorbidities, and this requires an in-depth knowledge of how molecular mechanisms influence disease progression and therapy.
This will require collecting, storing and analyzing large volumes of patient and provider data relating to genomics, transcriptomics, epigenomics, proteomics, metabolomics and pharmacogenomics; environmental factors like diet and lifestyle; as well as environmental influences like diet and lifestyle in an ethical and secure manner in order to protect participant privacy.
The White House will announce final privacy and trust principles for precision medicine (PMI). These provide core values and strategies to build public trust in PMI while realizing its benefits, as well as create a framework to protect participants’ sensitive personal information while meeting specific organization’s needs when conducting or participating in PMI activities. These will also apply when it comes to personalized healthcare delivery – this represents another paradigm shift in healthcare delivery.
Collaboration
Contrary to traditional, one-size-fits-all treatments, precision medicine takes into account how different people react to medications. By doing this, doctors and researchers are better able to predict which therapies will work for individual patients while also saving time spent trying treatments that won’t.
This approach avoids trial-and-error processes that could expose patients to potentially harmful side effects, and provides personalized treatment plans so they feel empowered in their healthcare journey.
Collaboration is at the center of precision medicine and meeting its goals, as evidenced by numerous examples presented at this workshop. Deborah Dunsire of Millennium Pharmaceuticals; Victor Dzau from Duke University and Duke Health System; Margaret Hamburg of FDA and Kathy Hudson from NIH all discussed effective collaboration pathways, leading to major advances in genomics, metabolomics, environmental sciences and biomedical data science fields – not to mention opening doors for potential treatments of diseases like cancer that can now be targeted using molecular data.
