Precision medicine is being considered one of the significant developments of scientific and medical research, to keep society healthier. This concept gained more popularity in 2015 when the then President of the United States announced it as his government’s key focus area in healthcare for more individualized treatments.

Allopathy is all set to use precision medicine in its advanced version. So far, some practices of precision medicine have been popular for a long time like blood transfusion as per the exact blood type of the individuals. Now precision medicine is being considered the future of healthcare as it is being predicted that precision medicine would help in reducing acute hospital admissions that get triggered due to adverse side-effects and reactions. According to the experts, precision medicine is going to enable preventative and predictive care. For researchers of popular medicine, it is a good avenue to explore how different drugs affect people with different genes. 

What’s in store for the future?

The future seems bright. Precision medicine will enable health care providers to use prevention strategies and tailor treatment as per people’s unique characteristics. It would include their genome sequence, microbiome composition, lifestyle, diet, and health records. Clinicians would be incorporating many different types of data - the microbiome which is the collection of microorganisms in or on the body, metabolomics which are the chemicals in the body at a certain point in time, and all medical records of the patients. With electronic health records, it is easier as all required data can very easily be shared between different stakeholders like providers, researchers, and most importantly, patients and research participants.

Precision medicine would prove to be a boon for chronic ailments like cancer. As per a research study published in the National Center for Biotechnology Information, US National Library of Medicine, “Tumors can have different underlying genetic causes and may express different proteins in one patient versus another. This inherent variability of cancer lends itself to the growing field of precision and personalized medicine (PPM). There are many ongoing efforts to acquire PPM data in order to characterize molecular differences between tumors. Some PPM products are already available to link these differences to an effective drug. It is clear that PPM cancer treatments can result in immense patient benefits, and companies and regulatory agencies have begun to recognize this.”