The rise of personalized medicine

Introduction

What is personalized medicine?

Precision medicine, also known as personalized medicine, is a promising field of healthcare that can be used to treat diseases that have confounded treatment options or cures. Personalized medicine articles talk about it being an integral section of medicine that contains each person's diagnostic, genetic, genotyping, and environmental information and statistics.

The basis of personalized medicine:

The human genome: Genomics and personalized medicine have a relationship far more intricate than we know.

The data about the genetics of each individual now facilitates healthcare researchers, doctors, and scientists, to create efficient care plans at every phase of an ailment, transferring the focus from responsive to preventive health care.

This means that now medicine will try to prevent a disease from occurring by tweaking its origin!

Amazing isn't it?

Benefits of personalized medicine

The concept tells us that no drug or therapy can be considered a one-size-fits-all treatment plan. Henceforth, treatment plans will be customized and tailor-made for you and only you.

1. Predict a probable disease and prevent it from happening

To figure this out, you need to understand what ‘genome’ and ‘genetic sequencing’ is. The genome is the full collection of genetic information that is DNA. Genetic sequencing is the method used to identify the sequence of the four chemical blocks of DNA (adenine, guanine, cytosine, and thymine) for anything alive.

The type of genetic information is ascertained by the order of these chemicals in each strand of DNA. Imagine it as an "instruction manual" for your life.

So, if this information tells us that high cholesterol levels and tendencies towards blocked arteries run in the family, then beginning aggressive lipid-lowering therapy early in life is a good call.

1. Pharmacogenetics to reduce the risk of side effects of medication

Pharmacogenetics is the study of how a person's genetic makeup interacts with the medicines that they take. Many efforts in precision medicine, such as selecting individualized drug combinations to attack a specific type of cancer, are based on this science.

1. Targeted therapies

This is particularly important for cancer. Certain prevalent cancers have known mutations. If genetic sequencing predicts a propensity to develop these mutations, then a risk reduction protocol can be implemented.

1. Co-relation between health and economy

Personalized medicine is new. Its affordability is still questionable for the masses. The concept also studies the comparison between the costs incurred to treat the disease versus the expenses involved in preventing it.

An approach towards the rise of personalized medicine:

Biobanking:

Biobanking is the collection and storage of DNA samples from various individuals (usually blood, saliva, and/or urine), which allows investigators to utilize large pools of possible participants who have already expressed a desire to take part in studies or trials.

Why is biobanking necessary?

1. Researchers must have the ability to access huge quantities of patient information to recognize trends in communities consistently and accurately.

2. To be capable of identifying appropriate applicants for clinical studies in future.

To summarize:

The advances made possible by genomics and personalized medicine are intriguing. Personalized medicine research papers say that it is already being applied in a plethora of cases, and this number is projected to rise exponentially in third-world countries as well.