The concept of personalised medicine actually dates back hundreds of years in the West, transforming from an idea into practice especially with the sequencing of the human genome at the turn of the 21st century. Personalised medicine (more recently referred to as precision medicine) looks at an individual’s unique genetic identity or molecular phenotype to better diagnose and select treatment options – increasing the chances of a successful outcome and reducing possible adverse reactions by allowing physicians to go beyond the ‘one size fits all’ treatment model. It also predicts someone’s susceptibility to diseases, which can be used to help avoid or reduce the extent to which they will experience that disease.
Our current difficulty in predicting treatment success for many diseases and conditions means that clinicians have no choice but to follow a less than optimal approach to prescribing drugs and other treatment options.
One of the first steps in personalising medicine is identifying biomarkers – found in blood and other body fluids such as urine, sputum and cerebrospinal fluid (CSF), or tissue – that represent normal or abnormal cell functioning. Measuring and quantifying biomarkers can better educate doctors about the characteristics of an individual’s condition or disease to help them make informed decisions about the value of possible treatments.
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