Personalized medicine and what it means for you
Personalized medicine is big news. But why are scientists and doctors so excited by it? Well, imagine being able to get a more accurate and faster diagnosis, and then being given a treatment that your physician can more confidently know is the best treatment option specifically for you. That’s why there’s so much effort going into developing personalized medicines and diagnostics.
By better understanding our DNA, instead of taking a ‘one size fits all’ approach, medical professionals and researchers around the world hope to tailor healthcare for individual patients. Think “tailored suit” verses an off-the-shelf approximate fit.
This will enable them to:
- Predict and prevent diseases
- More precisely diagnose illnesses
- Personalize treatments for the individual
- Give you, the patient, a more active role in your treatment
Here, we explore what personalized medicine is, how it is benefiting some patients so far and how clinical trials help scientists and doctors to develop further personalized diagnostic tests and treatments.
What is personalized medicine?
Most approaches to treatment assume that most patients with a particular condition will respond similarly to a drug. Whereas personalized medicine, also known as personalized care or precision medicine, involves analyzing your genes along with other clinical and diagnostic information. This enables healthcare providers to do a few beneficial things.
Firstly, it can help your clinician to determine your individual risk of developing a disease. Depending on your risk profile, they may then be able to recommend healthy habits that could impact your overall long-term health as well as earlier screening tests that support early diagnosis. These screening tests are particularly beneficial for patients who are at a greater risk of developing cancer.
Secondly, by understanding your genes your doctor can create a very specific treatment plan specific to you. This treatment plan could then include the medicines and procedures to which you should respond well. Doctors can sometimes even identify effective treatments that could cause you fewer side effects, making your healthcare experience more manageable. The below diagram shows how “standard” treatments are different from personalized medicines.
Standard treatments
- Broad, symptom-driven diagnosis
- Everybody receives the same medicine
- 30–60% effective
Personalized medicine
- Individual characterization of underlying causes informed by genomics
- Tailored treatment to match an individual’s genetic profile
- More effective and fewer side effects
Your doctor or nurse might not refer this as “personalized medicine”. Instead, they may speak to you about genetic, DNA or molecular testing, or even biomarkers and creating a genetic profile. If they do, ask them about the personalized medicine approaches they’re exploring.
A new, targeted approach for lung cancer
Personalized medicine can help to deliver better healthcare outcomes. In fact, it is already transforming some cancer treatments. All cancer has a genetic base. In other words, cancer may develop because of genetic changes, or mutations, that can happen during a person’s life. These changes affect how cells work, multiply and divide.
By understanding the genetic mutations that have caused a patient’s cancer, doctors can prescribe the most effective treatment for their genomic diagnosis. For example, for lung cancer, we can now tell whether a patient’s tumor will be responsive to antibody therapies or what doctors call small molecule therapies. The doctor might even discover that current available treatments will not be effective and therefore recommend that the patient might consider enrolling in a clinical trial to receive a developmental therapeutic. Ultimately, the sooner the patient receives the best treatment for them, the better.
Personalized medicine could also benefit patients who suffer from long term conditions such as diabetes or a cardiovascular or respiratory disease, as well as other cancers.
We’re only at the beginning of the personalized medicine journey. In the future, it’s likely that most treatments will be personalized, but first, scientists and doctors have a lot of research to do.
Embracing the future of personalized medicine
As more personalized diagnostic tests and medicines become available, we could see an evolution of modern medicine that may deliver real improvements for people around the world. Scientists are making progress all the time, so ask your clinician if personalized medicine is available to you. If personalized medicine isn’t yet available for your condition and traditional treatments aren’t helping, you might want to ask your doctor or nurse if there are any clinical trials you could join.
Clinical trials are a crucial part of developing personalized diagnostics and therapeutics. Scientists and doctors use clinical trials to improve their understanding of a disease, including its genetic factors. They also use trials to determine how different treatments affect individual patients based on their genetic profile as well as to test the safety and effectiveness of developmental therapeutics.