There was a time when modern medicine was primitive. There were no antibiotics, so every infection took its own course, leading to decline in health. Hypertension and diabetes were largely untreatable. X-ray was new, and remedies had changed but little from medieval times. No one ever embarked on the goodness of preventative treatment, not to speak of predictive medicine, beyond taking a distasteful cod liver oil capsule.

During the last hundred years, modern medicine has undergone a sea change. Just think of it — an ever-expanding repertoire of medicines, high-tech procedures, therapies and reams of clinical data to employ when one gets sick. Yet modern medicine remained (in)complete, notwithstanding the therapeutic advances.

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Things are now changing thanks to the integration of all such advances, from how a person’s diet interacts with one’s unique genetic profile to how environmental pollutants affect our thinking, not to speak of preventative medical approaches in health and wellness. The big perestroika has begun, and it is poised to transform health care for a growing number of people in the near future. Welcome to a whole new world of personalized, bespoke medicine.

Customized Medicine

Personalized medicine is, in essence, tailored or customized medical treatment. It treats while keeping in mind the unique, individual characteristics of each patient, which are as distinct as one’s fingerprint or signature. It also includes scientific breakthroughs in our understanding of how a person’s unique molecular and genetic profile makes them susceptible to certain illnesses. Personalized medicine expands our ability to envisage medical treatments that would not only be effective but also safe for each patient while excluding treatments that may not provide useful objectives.

Personalized medicine is, in simple terms, the use of new methods of molecular scrutiny. It is keyed to help better manage a patient’s illness or their genetic tendency toward a particular illness or a group of diseases. In so doing, it aims to achieve optimal therapeutic outcomes by helping both clinicians and patients choose a disease management approach that is likely to work best in the context of the patient’s unique genetic and environmental summary. In other words, it allows to accurately diagnose diseases and their sub-types while prescribing the best form and dose of medication most suited to the given patient.

Personalized, or precision, medicine is not rocket science — it is, in essence, an extension of certain traditional approaches to understanding and treating disease. What jazzed up the therapeutic fulcrum of personalized medicine are tools that are more precise. This is what also offers clinicians better insights for selecting a treatment protocol based on a patient’s molecular profile. Such a patient-specific methodology, as has been practiced for long in certain complementary and alternative medical (CAM) or integrative approaches, not only curtails harmful side effects but also leads to more successful outcomes, including reduced costs in comparison to the current trial-and-error approach to treatment, which has distressingly come to the fore during these extraordinary and unprecedented times of COVID-19.

It is still early days, but the fact remains that personalized medicine has changed the old ways of how we all thought about, identified and managed health issues. As personalized medicine increasingly bids fair to an exciting journey in terms of clinical research and patient care, its impact will only further expand our understanding of medical technology.

Tapping Nature

What personalized medicine has done is bring about a paradigm shift in our thinking about people in general and also specifically. We all vary from one another — what we eat, what others eat, how we react to stress or experience health issues when exposed to environmental factors. It is agreed that such variations play a role in health and disease. It is also being incrementally accepted that certain natural variations found in our DNA can influence our risk of developing a certain disease and how well we could respond to a particular medicine.

All of us are unique individuals, perhaps with the exemption of identical twins, albeit the genomes are unique in them, too. While we are genetically similar, there are small differences in our DNA that are unique, which also makes us distinctive in terms of health, disease and our response to certain medicinal treatments.

Personalized medicine is poised to tap natural variations found in our genes that may play a role in our risk of getting or not getting certain illnesses, along with numerous external factors, such as our environment, nutrition and exercise. Variations in DNA can, likewise, lead to differences in how medications are absorbed, metabolized and used by the body. The understanding of such genetic variations and their interactions with environmental factors are elements that will help personalized medicine clinicians to produce better diagnostics and drugs, and select much better treatments and dosages based on individual needs — not as just “fixing” a pill or two, as is the present-day conventional medical practice.

It is established that a majority of genes function precisely as intended. This gives rise to proteins that play a significant role in biological processes while allowing or helping an individual to grow, adapt and live in their environment. It is only in certain unusual situations, such as a single mutated or malfunctioning gene, that our apple cart is disturbed. This leads to distinct genetic diseases or syndromes such as sickle cell anemia and cystic fibrosis. In like manner, multiple genes acting together can impact the development of a host of common and complex diseases, including our response to medications used to treat them.

New Advances

New advances will revolutionize bespoke medical treatment with the inclusion of drug therapy as well as recommendations for lifestyle changes to manage, delay the onset of disease or reduce its impact. Not surprisingly, the emergence of new diagnostic and prognostic tools has already raised our ability to predict likely outcomes of drug therapy. In like manner, the expanded use of biomarkers — biological molecules that are associated with a particular disease state — has resulted in more focused and targeted drug development.

Molecular testing is being expansively used today to identify breast cancer and colon cancer patients who are likely to benefit from new treatments and to preempt recurrences. A genetic test for an inherited heart condition is helping clinicians to determine which course of treatment would maximize benefit and minimize serious side effects while bringing about curative outcomes.

Such complexities exist for asthma and other disorders too. This is precisely where molecular analysis of biomarkers can help us to identify sub-types within a disease while enabling the clinician to monitor their progression, select appropriate medication, measure treatment outcomes and patients’ response. Future advances may make biomarkers and other tools affordable and allow clinicians to screen patients for relevant molecular variations prior to prescribing a particular medication.

It is already clear that personalized medicine promises three strategic benefits. In terms of preventative medicine, personalized medicine will improve the ability to identify which individuals are predisposed to develop a particular condition. A better understanding of genetic variations could also help scientists identify new disease subgroups or their associated molecular pathways and design drugs to target them. This could also help select patients for inclusion, or exclusion, in late-stage clinical trials. Finally, it will allow to work out the best dosage schedule or combination of drugs for each individual patient.

Yet not everything is hunky-dory for personalized medicine. Critics of precision medicine believe that the whole idea is too much of overhyped razzmatazz, among other things. Proponents, however, argue that when it comes to managing our own health, most of us are used to the idea of taking a one-size-fits-all approach — be it medicines, supplements, diets and diagnoses. This may be wrong.

What works, as they put it, for one may be a gaffe for another. As the award-winning oncologist and medical technology innovator, Dr. David B. Agus, author of the groundbreaking book “The End of Illness,” puts it, each patient’s individual risk factors are based on one’s DNA, the environment and a preventative lifestyle plan in response. He begins with simple, profound pointers: “How is your sense of smell?” and “Is your ring finger longer than your middle finger?” He explains with statistics-backed guidelines that moving and walking regularly is mandatory because exercising and then sitting is equivalent to smoking cigarettes, while eating and sleeping at consistent hours is imperative because irregularity causes inflammation.

The inference is obvious: We should all understand our physiology and quiz doctors with the thorough, exploratory frame of mind of a gadget buyer. This holds the key to making medicine truly personal, more humane, effective and safe while keeping in mind the individual in us all as unique and distinctive, the sum of the whole — not just the parts.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.