According to the 2022 study led by an international team of scientists from ten prominent universities, including the University of Oxford, the University of Zurich, and Stanford University, only 5% of medical treatments were supported by high-quality evidence of their health benefits. Furthermore, during the treatment research phase, three times more resources were allocated to measuring potential health improvements than potential harm.
In addition to limited resources available to scientists, the results of medical trials rarely consider the unique physiology of patients beyond their age and sex. Factors such as genetic profile, environmental conditions, and lifestyle can considerably affect the efficacy of treatment and increase the probability of side effects.
The innovative approach of personalized medicine, also known as precision medicine, aims to improve the effectiveness of medical care by making accurate predictions for treatment outcomes based on the aforementioned factors often overlooked by conventional medicine. In this article, you will learn about the potential of precision medicine and its current applications.
Where Is Precision Medicine Most Commonly Used Today?
The capabilities of personalized medicine create significant opportunities for its adoption in various fields. Its major applications so far include the following.
Pharmacogenomics
The study of the connection between genes and human response to drugs, known as pharmacogenomics, is one of the fields leveraging precision medicine. By combining pharmacology, the science focused on drugs, with genomics, which specializes in genes and their functions, pharmacogenomics aims to improve the effects of drug therapy and reduce side effects.
Pharmacogenomics has great potential to address the conventional “one-dose-fits-all” approach by tailoring treatment to the exact genetic profile of an individual patient.
Oncology Treatment and Risk Assessment
Most cancer treatments, such as radiation therapy, chemotherapy, or surgery, are known for their high costs and overall drastic effects on the body. At the same time, the outcomes of these procedures do not always fulfil patients’ needs.
Precision medicine offers innovative methods that help doctors select more effective cancer treatments. With comprehensive genomic profiling (CGP), doctors can perform cancer biomarker testing in patients, assessing a unique pattern of proteins, genes, and other substances that can interfere with the effectiveness of medications, therapies, and invasive medical procedures.
In addition to biomarker testing, patients can also benefit from precision oncology, which detects genetic alterations in cancer cells.
Moreover, precision medicine is also used for a more accurate evaluation of an individual’s predisposition to cancer.
Treatment of Genetic and Rare Diseases
By harnessing next-generation sequencing (NGS), a state-of-the-art technology for massively parallel sequencing of entire genomes, precision medicine helps doctors diagnose and manage inherited diseases and rare genetic disorders.
Advantages and Limitations of Precision Medicine
Some applications of precision medicine rely on cutting-edge technologies such as NGS mentioned earlier, as well as advanced imaging techniques including magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), computed tomography (CT), and positron emission tomography (PET), along with complex machine learning algorithms. These technologies come with significant costs, which currently limit the accessibility of some of the applications of precision medicine.
However, the increased effectiveness of personalized treatments that precision medicine offers, combined with minimized side effects, can significantly reduce expenses associated with ineffective medical procedures and drug therapies, treatment failures, side effects, and recovery periods.
Furthermore, some sectors of precision medicine, including biomarker testing, are under constant development aimed at minimizing or eliminating the need for surgical interventions and even the use of expensive imaging procedures. For example, a recent proposal to use the thymidine kinase enzyme as a breast cancer marker present in the blood has the potential to eliminate the need for biopsy procedures, which are currently required for assessing the Ki67 biomarker commonly used by doctors to evaluate tumors before treatment. The specific nature of thymidine kinase and possibilities for much less invasive collection of this enzyme from patients compared to the collection of Ki67, make it possible for doctors to monitor its levels throughout the entire anti-cancer therapy and continually evaluate its effectiveness.
Personalized medicine also emphasizes risk assessment and can offer insights into genetic susceptibility to diseases before they manifest. In some cases, this knowledge enables the implementation of preventative measures that can delay or inhibit the onset of these diseases. In addition to enhancing treatments of complex health conditions such as cancer or genetic diseases, precision medicine also can improve regular drug prescriptions and avoid the trial-and-error pattern.
Conclusions
The efforts of many generations have led to significant advancements in modern medicine, saving millions of lives worldwide every year. However, many individuals do not respond to treatments as expected, experiencing inefficacy from drugs and medical procedures that have been beneficial for others.
Although many applications of precision medicine currently require greater resources for patient diagnostics and treatment selection due to their personalized approach and costly technologies, it does not come as a rule. New, much more affordable techniques, for instance, thymidine kinase biomarker testing, are being developed.
Finally, even expensive procedures supporting precision medicine can be potentially more cost-effective as they can significantly improve decision-making. As a result, individuals are more likely to receive effective treatments and avoid adverse effects, which also often translates into financial savings.
