Welcome to the Future of Personalized Medicine
In clinical practice, personalized medicine refers to the use of new methods of molecular analysis to better manage a patient's disease or predisposition towards a disease. It aims to achieve optimal medical outcomes by helping physicians and patients choose the disease management approaches likely to work best in the context of a patient's genetic and environmental profile1.
The future of cancer treatment, prevention and detection will be guided by the use of more effective cancer biomarkers. Biomarkers are biological molecules found in blood, body fluids tissues or within the tumour itself. Ultimately, biomarkers have the potential to spur innovation, streamline the development process and help patients by providing treatment tailored to their genetic makeup.
The promise of personalized medicine is to improve the safety and effectiveness of drug therapy in an individual patient, particularly in deadly diseases like cancer.
There are several key areas where personalized medicine may have a tremendous impact on the future of healthcare:
- Diagnosis: Genetic information may help to more precisely identify the specific variant of a patient’s disease, or their predisposition to certain diseases.
- Patient selection: Biomarkers can help guide physicians in making treatment decisions for their patients by providing information on what patients may be most likely to respond to a particular treatment.
- Drug development: Combining information about genetics and a drug’s biologic relevance may allow companies that develop treatments to make earlier and better informed decisions during the drug development process.