Personalized Medicine Moves Forward

Under the traditional one-size-fits-all approach to medicine, a physician makes an initial diagnosis based on a profile of symptoms.  Then the doctor prescribes a treatment, such as a drug or surgical procedure, which has helped the greatest number of other people with that same set of symptoms.  If that treatment doesn't work, a trial-and-error approach follows.  This involves substituting another drug or prescribing more surgery, in a continuous, time-consuming, and costly process. 

One obvious problem with this model is that different diseases often have the same symptoms.  Another problem is that different individuals respond differently to the same treatments; a drug may be much more effective for one patient than it is for another patient with the same condition.  Of course, the one-size-fits-all approach is obscenely expensive in terms of dollars spent and lives lost to ineffective treatments.

For these reasons, the Trends editors have been closely following the evolution of personalized medicine over the past decade.  Personalized medicine is the practice of medicine based on the individual patient, rather than a statistical sample.   It involves devising customized therapies that take advantage of an individual patient's genetic makeup and unique pathology. 

These therapies include, but are not limited to, genetic screening and tissue engineering, as well as gene and adult stem cell therapies.  Although still in its infancy, personalized medicine has clearly become a practical reality, with many ongoing clinical trials and a few commercial applications. 

Let's take a look at some of the latest developments in this evolving field and consider where they seem to be taking us.

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Personalized medicine involves a truly new approach.  As the Harvard Business Review¹ explains, with this new approach, the doctor starts with an understanding of the patient's unique physiology down to the molecular level, as well as his or her ability to metabolize each specific drug. 

One organization, The Institute for Molecular Medicine, in Finland, has been working on guidelines for promoting the use of personalized medicine in the treatment of diseases.² 

According to Jonathan Knowles, a professor at the institute, "We need more detailed analysis of different types of cancer if we want to develop safe and effective drug treatments.  We also need more knowledge about individual patients to be able to effectively tailor the treatments to match the patients' specific needs."

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