Imagine the typical hospital experience: along with many others, a doctor takes hours to diagnose you, before then giving you the same treatment as he gives everyone else with the same problem; later, you get side effects from that treatment. But what if it could be different? What if your diagnosis was swift, and your treatment tailored specifically to you, with no side effects? Perhaps, even, this illness was predicted and treated beforehand. Sound too good to be true? Fortunately, this is very real. This is personalised medicine. This is the future.
Personalised medicine, also called precision medicine, is the concept of customising healthcare so that treatment and practices are tailored to the specific patient, or subgroup of patients. Have you ever thought it strange that everyone receives very similar treatments when they have an illness, despite how complex and unique our genomes are? Often referred to as a 'one-size-fits-all' approach, this has many disadvantages. It doesn't take into account what treatment plan would be most successful on the patient as a unique individual. This is why clinicians are now working to tailor medical care to the patient's individual needs.
By analysing the human genome, scientists can identify patterns which can help them determine an individual's risk for certain diseases, among many other benefits. For starters, illnesses can be detected earlier on. If doctors can treat this before the symptoms even appear, the chances of a speedy recovery vastly increase. In addition, interventions to improve a person's health can be identified. A person's lifestyle choices and diet can have an enormous impact on their overall health and risk of disease. If the most effective interventions are identified sooner, the risk of developing any illnesses then decreases, which allows the focus to be placed on the prevention, rather than treatment.
One way that the UK's NHS is moving towards personalised medicine is the 100,000 Genome Project. Focusing on rare and infectious diseases, as well as some types of cancer, this project involves sequencing genomes from patients. This project involves around 85,000 NHS patients, with the aim of transforming patient care. The data produced by sequencing the genome is combined with medical records to provide a resource for researchers. They can then interpret and study this data, with the hope of determining which variants cause which diseases. You may be wondering how effective this has been. Well, after the 100,000th genome was sequenced in December of 2018, some impressive findings include the fact that ~50% of cancer cases now have the potential for a clinical trial or a therapy. In addition to this, there are actionable findings for almost 1 in 4 rare disease patients.
Personalised medicine certainly has enormous potential to significantly improve healthcare. I have no doubt that the current efforts of the NHS, such as the NHS Genomic Medicine Service, will prove to be a remarkable step towards even more effective healthcare.