THE FUTURE OF PERSONALIZED MEDICINE

The Future of Personalized Medicine



The Future of Personalized Medicine

Introduction

The main purpose of this paper is to make a description on the future of personalized medicines. This paper gives a description of the personalized medicines, and the technologies that will make it happen.

Discussion

Personalized medicine has the capability to bring changes in the way in which medicine is practiced. It is allowing health care providers to adapt strategies for prevention of significant diseases, eliminate trial-and-error inefficiencies that inflate health care costs and undermine patient care, and to design drugs that have less side effects and more effective. Moreover, it also allows medicines to move from to prevention instead of reaction, predict susceptibility to disease, improve disease detection, preempt disease progression and reduce the time, cost, and failure rate of pharmaceutical clinical trials. Personalized medicine can be defined as a field in healthcare that is advancing rapidly. It is meeting the personalized needs of the people especially their clinical, genetic, genomic, and environmental information (Baruch, 2008, p. 245). It has been predicted that modern genetic technology will lead to personalized medicine with the progress in time. However, there are many benefits as well as drawbacks of personalized medicine (Baruch, 2005, p. 667).

Personalized medicine can be considered as the latest piece of innovation that would transform medicine. Moreover, since advancements have been seen with regards to technology, genetic testing can be used to introduce personalized medicine. The introduction of treatment protocols that are improved can be used to track the elements that signal the diseases and the risks involved with it on a genetic level. Human genome was completed by Tony White and biosystems provided the tools that were required. Moreover, he also stated that the uses of personalized medicine are already used by the patients suffering from cancer and HIV patients (Hudson, 2006, pp. 1083). He also talked about gene from which tumor suppressor protein known as p53 gene is produced. In cases when the gene is very high, it can detect the diseases but if it is low, even then it has the capability to detect diseases.

Modern technology has played a major role in improving personalized medicine. Disease includes breast cancer which can be treated by determining oncogene which develops cancer (Katsanis, 200, pp. 853). The patients who suffer from breast cancer have oncogene which is over expressed and therefore, the physicians are able to treat them by using monoclonal antibody that inhibits the gene, Herceptin. Many benefits of personalized medicine have been highlighted not just by the patients and the physicians but also by the companies that supply drugs. By matching therapeutics to DNA profiles, the patients can be given medicine accordingly which will treat the disease in a better way. The doctor can recommend drugs that are safer; therefore, the negative side effects of the drugs can be reduced. Besides this, there are paths that provide with cures with regards to disease such as cancer and this is done by showing why certain ...