Opinion: What Is Personalized Medicine And Why Is It So Important?

The following is an opinion article written by Laura Towart, CEO and founder of My Personal Therapeutics, a London based digital health company offering advanced personalized cancer therapeutics. Their Personal Discovery Process uses fruit fly “avatars” to genetically mimic a patient’s cancer to identify drug combinations against the specific cancer. You can learn more about the company by reading this BioSpace article or going to their website.

The same shoe size fits everyone with similar feet, but this approach doesn’t work so well for medical treatment.

When someone is diagnosed with cancer, for example, it simply means that they have a condition that propagates abnormal cells within their body. Even though the condition’s underlying cause and characteristics will differ from person to person, the course of treatment is rather consistent: patients are prescribed anti-cancer medication and a course of chemotherapy. An estimated 1,735,350 Americans were diagnosed with cancer in 2018, but 1.7 million people can’t all be the same.

The origins of disease and disorder can obviously depend on a number of things, so building a full picture of a patient’s health enables a medical team to provide the best care possible. Doctors ought to consider data points like where someone is from, how physically active they are, any history of disease in the patient’s family, and the patient’s own medical history. For maximum completeness, they might even sample the patient’s DNA to get a view into the genetic recipe that makes them who they are.

This is the thinking that drives personalized medicine, also called precision medicine. It shuns the “one size fits all” paradigm to see every patient exactly as they are — as an individual in need of specialized medical help.

Personalized medicine is the tailoring of medical treatment to each patient’s unique characteristics.

Just consider cancer: details on tumors caused by the same kind of cancer can completely differ from one patient to another. Just because two patients have the same type of cancer doesn’t mean they need the same treatment. What works well for one person’s breast cancer might be completely ineffective for another’s — furthermore, that treatment might even harm her.

Just as people have their own unique identifying traits like height and hair color, identical medical conditions can manifest in their own unique ways. It only makes sense that doctors should tailor their treatment to the individual as well.

Genetic data makes it possible.

When scientists sequenced the complete human genome in 2003, it unlocked a new era of medical possibilities. This breakthrough specifically involved determining the order of the four chemical building blocks that make up a DNA molecule — they’re called “bases,” and there are approximately 3 billion pairs of them in the human genome. The order in which these bases appear reveals the genetic information that each segment of DNA carries.

In other words, medical researchers had developed a kind of Rosetta Stone for human genetic information. Sequencing the human genome presented us with a roadmap for identifying which characteristics a human being stands to acquire. We significantly enhanced our understanding of how someone’s unique molecular and genetic profile might leave them vulnerable to certain diseases or conditions, whether that information was already medically known or not.

With the code of human DNA figuratively cracked, we quickly moved into the realm of molecular medicine, solving medical problems at their most fundamental level. Deploying this caliber of technique on a personalized basis is one of the most powerful, scientifically driven tools a medical team can deploy.

Personalized medicine is a powerful extension of traditional approaches to the way we understand and treat disease.

Someone specializing in personalized medicine speaks exactly the same language as any general practitioner or other medical professional. They simply use different tools and different data to inform their decisions in pursuit of high-quality outcomes for a given patient.

Personalized medicine professionals will prescribe conventional medicines and treatments familiar to any other doctor, but they are able to do so with unparalleled precision and efficacy. Where an everyday oncologist might rely on a go-to playbook for cancer treatment, personalized medicine flips this paradigm on its head. By starting with the individual’s unique makeup, the patient becomes the playbook.

Physicians in this sector enjoy access to a higher-precision tools, they can select a therapy or treatment protocol that’s completely customized to a patient’s molecular profile. This ensures minimal harmful side effects and increases the likelihood of a more successful outcome. It’s time for medicine to move past its trial-and-error approach to disease treatment.

Personalized medicine has the potential to change the way we think about, identify, and manage health problems.

You’ve probably heard the term “big data” before in reference to business and internet technology. When the medical world collects highly precise data about individual patients at scale, it is laying the foundation for a comparative database that will make high-quality diagnoses quicker and more affordable in the future.

Imagine that personalized medicine has been the norm for 20 years. A doctor would only need to plug your vital statistics into a database and check them against your declared symptoms in order to see what worked for other people just like you.

This is the value of big data — when I say “just like you,” I mean that we’ll eventually be able to segment out previous patients of all different demographics with deep specificity. Suppose you’re a 20-year-old male who drinks twice a week, works out regularly, has a family history of bone marrow cancer, and has genetic predispositions for depression. If you were complaining of headaches and blurry vision, historic medical data would grant doctors access to what previously worked for people just like you having the same problem.

This branch of medicine is already making a meaningful impact on clinical research and patient care. It’s only poised to grow in the future as technology improves, as new medical breakthroughs emerge, and as we ultimately build a better understanding of human disease and disorder.

But we don’t have to wait to confirm the obvious: the medical sector can do better than “one size fits all.”