Precision medicine is a medical approach to disease diagnosis, prevention, and treatment that takes into account each patient’s unique genetics, history, and lifestyle. The treatments are improved, and adverse effects are minimized, lowering the overall cost of healthcare for society.
What impact will precision medicine have on the healthcare sector?
Precision medicine has the ability to overcome traditional medicine’s limitations by focusing on prevention rather than reaction. Precision medicine, which uses genetic insights and other medical improvements in technology to provide a better understanding of diseases, is fast evolving as research develops. This method enables doctors to make more precise diagnoses and develop specialized treatment strategies.
Pharmaceutical companies’ drugs and therapies are frequently employed to treat large groups of people, and as a result, they work for some individuals but not for others. It is expected that just half of individuals who take a prescription medicine that makes it to market will benefit from it. By treating each patient as an individual, precision medicine offers the ability to overcome traditional medicine’s limitations by moving the focus from reaction to prevention.
How does precision medicine work?
The precision therapy approach to drug development is significantly more targeted. Scientists have discovered more about the genetics behind how diseases begin and behave as a result of their comprehensive research. Many diseases have now been proven to be connected to genetic alterations. It is feasible to study the role of genome variation among various individuals and populations thanks to the availability of a human genome reference sequence.
It is now possible to see the influence of genome variation on health on a larger scale as our understanding of the role of genome variation in disease improves. With this knowledge, it is feasible to identify how particular gene alterations produce disease and what makes one person’s heart disease, diabetes, or cancer operate differently from another’s. With this knowledge, treatments can be tweaked to improve their effectiveness.
What advantages can precision medicine offer?
By determining a patient’s risk of developing a disease, an effective prevention plan can be devised, eliminating unnecessary suffering for the patient. This is also good for society since it reduces the financial burden that illness and poor treatments have on healthcare systems.
Precision medicine has the ability to prevent undesirable side effects if people do get a disease. It is also feasible to discover the most beneficial treatment plan before attempting other ways, speeding up the recovery process and maybe extending life expectancy, thanks to medical accuracy.
Precision medicine also reduces pharmaceutical clinical trial time, cost and failure rate. Although developing targeted treatments can be more expensive, it eliminates the complexities and costs involved in trial and error in traditional medicine development.
Is Precision Medicine the Way of the Future in Healthcare?
Precision medicine presents a huge chance to influence the future of healthcare. While precision medicine is now the most progressed in oncology, it also has a wide range of fascinating applications outside of oncology and late-stage diseases, such as uncommon and genetic diseases, and it has some promise in treating COVID-19.
Precision medicine, on the other hand, is a difficult procedure to integrate into healthcare.
To be successful with precision, healthcare providers will require digital tools to assist them in grasping the complex data generated by the approach. While Artificial Intelligence platforms have emerged as viable tools for enabling precision medicine, these technologies will also pose difficulties for healthcare providers.
Another obstacle to precision medicine is primary care clinicians’ lack of training and understanding. As public interest in commercial genetic testing grows, primary care physicians are asked to provide a clinical context for their patient’s test results.
Most practitioners, on the other hand, have not received extensive training in genomes or genetics. Healthcare educators will need to incorporate genomes and genetics into their continuing professional development training courses or curricula to enhance the adoption of precision medicine procedures.
The benefits of precision medicine may not be accessible to everyone. Specific populations are excluded from benefiting from this revolutionary technology since some precision medicines will not work for them or will be too expensive. The industry must address current disparities for everyone to benefit from precision therapy.
Precision medicine, in general, has vast and priceless potential to enhance patient outcomes and challenge the future of healthcare. However, to fully appreciate the benefits and capabilities of precision medicine, the industry must address infrastructure, disparities, and knowledge gaps.
Personalized Care is the term used in the clinic when the Precision Medicine theory is implemented. Doctors have been practising Precision Medicine and providing Personalized Care for many years. High blood pressure, for example, is still frequently tested because it’s a strong risk factor for vascular disease that responds well to lifestyle adjustments.
The seven opportunities to accelerate an equitable realization of the promise of precision medicine are (1) huge, interoperable, longitudinal cohorts, (2) improved diversity and inclusion in science, (3) big data and artificial intelligence, (4) routine clinical genomics to guide prevention, diagnosis, and therapy, (5) electronic health records (EHRs) as a source for phenomic and genomic research, (6) greater variety, higher resolution phenomics and environmental exposure data for both clinical and research use, and (7) privacy, participant trust, and returning value.
Decades of developments in science and medicine, along with vast and rapid technological advancements, have helped in the bioinformatics era, and there have never been so many biomarkers, each capable of informing diagnoses and directing therapies. In breast cancer, measuring circulating levels of Estrogen receptors in the blood is now the standard of care so that anti-hormone therapies (or other treatments) can be given.
In addition, precision medicine is deeply entwined with the complexity of biology and illness, requiring large-scale data analytics, bioinformatics, computational biology, machine learning, and artificial intelligence. Furthermore, we must examine the role of precision medicine in healthcare development.
References
https://medlineplus.gov
https://www.proclinical.com
https://magellanhealthinsights.com
Denny JC, Collins FS. Precision medicine in 2030-seven ways to transform healthcare. Cell. 2021 Mar 18; 184(6):1415-1419. doi: 10.1016/j.cell.2021.01.015. PMID: 33740447; PMCID: PMC9616629.
