Personalized medicine is a medical treatment tailored to the individual characteristics of each patient. The approach relies on scientific breakthroughs in our understanding of how a person’s unique molecular and genetic profile makes them vulnerable to certain diseases. It is considered an extension of traditional approaches to know and advise in favour of the prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of the disease. Physicians, equipped with precise tools, can select a therapy or treatment protocol, based on the patient’s molecular profile, which will minimize the harmful side effects, ensure a more successful outcome and help contain costs compared with a trial-and-error approach to treat diseases.
Personalized medicine can be defined widely as a model of healthcare that is customized, preventive and participatory. It has the potential to alter the way we think about, identify and manage health problems. It is already having an exciting impact on both clinical research and patient care, and this impact will grow as our understanding and technologies improve. Biomarkers are of increasing importance for personalised medicine, with applications including diagnosis, prognosis, and selection of targeted therapies. Their use is extremely diverse, ranging from pharmacodynamics to treatment monitoring.
Biomarkers, in simpler terms, are molecules that indicate normal, or abnormal processes taking place in the body and may be an indication of an underlying condition or disease. Various types of molecules like DNA (genes), proteins or hormones, can function as biomarkers since they all indicate something about your health. They act as early warning systems for your health. For instance, high cholesterol levels are a standard biomarker for heart condition risk. Body measurements like weight, body mass index(BMI) and waist-to-hip ratios are used for assessing conditions such as obesity and metabolic disorders. While there may be more than 25000 to 200000 gene transcripts and up to 1000000 proteins, it is estimated there may be as few as 2,500 molecules in the human metabolome.
Many biomarkers come from simple measurements made during a routine doctor visit, like blood pressure or body weight and might even be present in the blood, stool, urine, tissues or body fluids. They assist in capturing changes at the cellular and molecular level. They play an integral role in drug development. Traditionally, anti-cancer drugs were agents that killed both cancer cells and healthy cells. However, more targeted therapies have now developed that can kill only the cancer cells, while sparing healthy cells. The assessment of a typical biomarker in cancer helps in the development of therapies that can target the biomarker.
Example: Breast Cancer
One of the earliest and most common examples of personalized medicine is Trastuzumab. About 30% of patients with breast cancer have a form that over-expresses a protein called HER2, which is not responsive to standard therapy. Trastuzumab was approved for patients with HER2 positive tumours in 1998; further research in 2005 showed that it reduced recurrence by 52% in combination with chemotherapy. Thus, we must have a wide range of biomarkers which will measure everything we would like to understand the effect of the investigational drug in people. As the medical landscape evolves, so does the approach in therapeutic intervention.
Although biomarker research is undoubtedly challenging, the employment of biomarkers can help increase the success rates of drug development programs and lead to the accelerated availability of novel therapies on the market. Ultimately, this will result in the development of better-targeted therapies and deliver precision medicine to finally bring forth individual patient management in a wide range of conditions. Progress within the research, clinical care, and personalized medicine policy have great potential to enhance the standard of patient care and help in containing health care costs.
