Gene genie: precision medicine is gaining ground
From number plates to drug development, the personal is big business and the individual has never been more important. Precision medicine is gaining ground with clinical trials centred around one person, not overall average results, becoming increasingly significant.
Last month Nature, ran an article highlighting how everyday millions of drugs are taken that have no effect on the patient. The piece stated: “The top ten highest grossing drugs in the United States help between 1 and 25 and 1 and 4 of the people who take them. For some drugs, such as statins – routinely used to lower cholestrol – as few as 1 in 50 may benefit. There are even drugs that are harmful to certain ethnic groups because of the bias towards white Western participants in classic clinical trials.”
In the US, the move towards a more personal and precise approach has seen Obama announce a $215 million Precision Medicine initiative and the ‘one size fits all’ approach is becoming less relevant for the treatment of certain illnesses such as cancer. Using genetic information to treat disease enables professionals to gain increased knowledge about tumours, for example, and the way in which tumours may exhibit their own set of genetic changes. By getting to grips with the changes taking place within cancer cells in one individual’s body, it is becoming possible to create more effective treatments targeted at that patient’s genetic profile.
An example of the advancement of personalised medicine has taken a step forward through a UK-US life science collaboration involving Cambridge-based Horizon Discovery. Nebraska-based Transgenomic has evaluated Horizon’s gene editing technology and has been so impressed it has strengthened the alliance to use Horizon’s human genomic reference standards to assure the quality and performance of its own technology. Transgenomic’s expertise crosses multi-disease areas including cancer, cardiology and inherited diseases where gene editing is critical to finding therapies tailored to an individual’s genetic make-up.
And on a more general scale, the link up of Apple and IBM is being hailed as potentially offering major implication for the growing number of people using wearable tech to monitor their health. The partnership will see the two companies and other medical device manufacturers make the data available to doctors. One consequence of this could be more personalised treatment for illness such as diabetes.
It’s all exciting stuff and the possibility of more targeted therapies and medicines has to be welcomed. At last the time has come to get up close and personal with the pharmaceutical sector.