Precision Medicine: A Personalized Treatment from Your Gene

Poor healthcare linked to 5 million annual death worldwide. Health is increasingly shaped by ageing populations, urbanization and globalization of unhealthy lifestyles, resulting in a transition in the burden of health care towards non communicable diseases, mental health and injuries. Many of these conditions are chronic, requiring long-term care, with patients commonly suffering from multi-morbidities, all of which adds to escalating health care costs. Precision medicine (PM) is a new approach to health care that matches individual patients with targeted treatments that work best for each them. PM is still in its infancy, but holds so much promise for the healthcare industry which considers genetic variations, environment and lifestyle. There would be global shift in the treatment modalities where people are moving towards pharmacogenomics which takes into consideration of the individual drug response to how body metabolize it helping in catering the patients with minimal Adverse Drug Reaction (ADR). Another field which is showing promise in the healthcare industry is wearable bio-services for better health and disease management. PM has roadblocks to clear before it hits the market clinician acceptability, pharma industry to cater drug to small population, developing diagnostic tests with sufficient sensitivity and specificity and having string regulatory mechanism to ensure clinical validity to the tests.