Personalized Medicine
So the whole world is going personalized. Even in medicine, which I guess most people would think is personalized anyway, it’s the Next Big Thing. Of course, it’s personalized to a degree in that your doctor will use their judgement in what you might have, but if you have the same disease as someone else, you’re likely to get the same drug and treatment.
That’s changing. In fact, Pfizer’s DX Division Head says that personalized programs are “happening in the development and commercial stages right now”. And that’s from the world’s largest pharmaceutical company. There’s $110bn of company valuation they have to protect in the future, so you can bet they’re spending some good money in this area.
In the UK, the government last month released a note on personalised medicine, covering the current movement away from the “One size fits all” approach. This note suggests that genetic differences between us can account for up to 95% of the variation in how we each respond to drugs.
Really what we’re talking about here is a more granular approach. Your medical, family and life history is combined with an ever greater number of lab test to build up a picture of you as different from another person with the same condition. Strictly speaking, this isn’t “personal”. It doesn’t mean that as an individual, you are unique, and will get a treatment no-one else will get. As the UK government report says, “Personalised medicine tailors treatment to patient subgroups“.
Of course it just isn’t possible to test new or existing drugs against every single person who could take them. So the best that can be expected right now is to know that a drug works for “someone like you“. One day, computer modelling of the effects of a drug on me as an individual (which would be my DNA plus my current health state, and changes that the environment and life have made – in fact a digital capture of the biology of me right now) will of course be possible – delivering truly personalised medicine. I’ll then pop a pill that would work for no-one else, and bingo – cured. Until then, I plan to avoid all germs, and eat only aloe vera.
