THE FUTURE OF PERSONALIZED MEDICINE

The Future of Personalized Medicine

The Future of Personalized Medicine

Personalized definition of medicine

In clinical practice, the term personalized medicine using new molecular methods to ensure better management of the illness suffered by a patient or a predisposition to the disease. It seeks to achieve optimal medical outcomes by helping physicians and patients to choose among the various treatment options which were likely to give the best results according to genetic and environmental profiles of patient. (Haile, 2008, 45-49)

Personalized medicine carries a promise: to improve the safety and effectiveness of medical treatment received by each patient, especially in the presence of deadly diseases.

Benefits of personalized medicine

Personalized medicine could have a real impact on the future of health care and that, in several key sectors, namely:

Diagnosis: obtaining genetic information could help to further clarify the genetic variant of the disease suffered by a patient or his predisposition to certain diseases.

Patient selection: biomarkers can help physicians guide their decisions about treatment to administer to their patients by providing information that helps determine which patients are most likely to respond favorably to a given treatment.

The development of medicines: combining data on genetics and the biological relevance of a drug, pharmaceutical research companies may be able to make decisions faster and more informed throughout the process of developing a drug.

Pharmacogenomics

Pharmacogenomics aims to study the interaction between all the genes and drug once absorbed. This field of pharmacology is currently in great development because it would enable the therapeutic treatments according to new criteria, measured directly from the genome. (Qing, 2008, 440-445)

Pharmacogenomics is based on the presence of a different response in different individuals to drug treatment. One cause of these facts is genetic. The study of the genome or its expression (via messenger RNA ) would know more precisely the origin of the differences and therefore to better target drug therapy, which can be very advantageous in terms of patient comfort, and total cost of therapy.

Pharmacogenetics

Pharmacogenetics is the science that identifies the genetic basis of inter-individual differences in drug response. This review uses a number of published examples of inherited differences in drug-metabolizing enzymes to illustrate the importance of heredity in determining the efficacy and toxicity of drugs in humans. Although their development is emerging, molecular diagnostic tests by which the physicians and pharmacists may select the drugs and doses for each patient individually. The development of pharmacogenetics provides at least one way to prescribe medicines without the current empiricism and toward a more personalized therapy.

Pharmaco-Metabonomic

'Pharmaco-metabonomic' approach to personalizing drug treatment uses a combination of pre-dose metabolite profiling and chemometrics to model and predict the responses of individual subjects. (Clayton et al, 2009, 14728-33)

Metabolomics

Metabolomics is the set of sciences and techniques dedicated to the comprehensive study of the system constituted by the set of molecules that constitute the metabolic intermediates, metabolites, hormones and other signal molecules, and secondary metabolites, which can be found in a biological system. It is a term proposed by Anglo Oliver et ...