Current medicine relies on a trial and error approach to treat disease and illness faced by the general population. Now however researchers and health care professionals are becoming increasing interested in the idea of treating patients based on their genetic code integrated with environmental and lifestyle factors; it is now widely believed this will be the future for medicine. The approach focuses on how each individual’s disease risks are specific and unique to them, this allows for specifically tailored drugs and therapies to be used for the exact needs of the patient. This could lead to benefits both the time and cost effectiveness of disease treatment. Personalised medicine has many benefits for many diseases however the most prominent is its benefits for treating cancer. Rather than the blanket treatments currently used, each specific genetic deformity and environmental factor that may have lead to the development of the disease can be screened for and potentially targeted and resolved. This could lead to major breakthroughs for a disease, which currently has a 50% survival rate in the UK (Cancer Research UK). However, critics argue that personalized medicine would not be universally accessible, due to its high cost and use of expensive technology. It is argued that more funding should be used to help treat pressing health issues in poorer, less economically developed countries, such as the treatment and prevention of HIV/AIDS and malaria.
The major benefit of personalized medicine is its ability to use the exact drugs to treat the individual’s specific health problem based on particular mutations or alleles in their genes, biomarkers, and the associated environmental factors, which may have lead to faulty proteins. J. Leonard Lichtenfeld told Genome Magazine “The number of targeted therapies in the pipeline for all diseases is increasing dramatically,” this combined with the personalised medicine, the use of each individuals genetic code, allows for treatment of many diseases to become more efficient, as it becomes both more time and cost effective. The current treatment method essentially uses trial and error, as doctors will often try multiple drugs and therapies until the correct solution is found. If personalised medicine were to be used the patients specific issue, caused by an associated biomarker, could be found quickly, without the need for multiple tests and scans. This would then be treated with the right drug straight away. Not only would this improve time effectiveness and lessen the possibility of the disease progressing, but would also decrease costs. Fewer drugs would need to be prescribed and fewer tests taken and assessed, this gives fewer costs as less materials are used and fewer professionals are needed to assess the data obtained. Although, the technology for genome assessment is expensive, overall, personalised medicine will most likely cost the National Health Service less money than current medicine. For example it was reported in the February 18, 2014 Annals of Internal Medicine, that personalized medicine which is focused on genetics, despite generally being believed to be more expensive than traditional approaches, could actually lower costs and improve the standard of health care and overall being more cost effective. This gives a strong case for personalised medicine as the future of medicine and will not only benefit us in our health care but will also enable more money to potentially be spent on other areas within our society.
One area many scientists believe that personalised medicine will be revolutionary is in the detection and treatment of cancer. An example of use of genetic sequencing to detect a risk factor for cancer is the case of treating individuals with a mutation to the gene BRCA1; this mutation gives a risk for development of breast cancer and a 35 to 60% risk for ovarian cancer [3] if an individual is aware of these risks they can then act to prevent themselves from developing cancer e.g. by having a mastectomy or an oophorectomy, this is a major benefit of personalised medicine. The treatment of lung cancer is one of the more highly developed areas of personalised medicine, many drugs are now used to treat particular lung cancer biomarkers, such as EGFR and ALK mutations, and more in clinical trials. In her article for Genome Magazine Jeanne Erdmann stated that lung cancer is “poster child” for the use of many personalised medicine strategies [4] such as assessing for risk factors in healthy people who believe they may have a genetic predisposition, to diagnosis and prognosis and choosing the best therapies based on both the type of tumor and genetics. This progress could seriously change the way we treat cancer in the future and potentially drastically improve the well being of patients in more ways than one. The use of specifically chosen treatments may mean less need for chemo and radiotherapy, which could make treatment much more pleasant and of course hopefully come to cure the patients disease at a much faster rate without allowing it to worsen and spread. This would all inturn cause the survival rate for those diagnosed to drastically increase. The use of personalised medicine to treat cancer is one of the fastest progressing areas in medicine currently, and leads many to believe that the use of genetic sequencing and assessment for particular biomarkers, will be the future of medicine as we know it.