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What’s good about personalized medicine

For a long time, the practice of medicine has largely been reactive, waiting for the onset of disease before treating or curing it. But we’re all unique in terms of genetic makeup, environment, and lifestyle factors. Our growing understanding of genetics and genomics – the study of all of a person’s genes – and how they drive health, disease and treatment in individual people offers an opportunity to step away from a ‘one size fits all’ approach based on broad population averages and adopt an individualized approach.

In addition to advances in the field of genomics, developments in the fields of science and technology play a crucial role in personalized medicine (for example, the development of high-resolution analytics, biotech research and chemistry, and the ability to decipher molecular structures, signaling pathways, and protein interactions that underpin the mechanisms of gene expression).

Personalized medicine is about more than prescribing the best drugs, although that’s a large part of it. Proponents say it would shift medicine’s emphasis from reaction to prevention, better predict disease susceptibility and improve diagnosis, produce more effective drugs and reduce adverse side effects, and eliminate the inefficiency and cost of adopting a trial-and-error approach to healthcare. […]

Despite its numerous benefits, the adoption of a personalized medicine approach raises several issues. For it to reach peak efficiency, a lot of genomic data must be collected from a large and diverse section of the population, and it’s critical that participants’ privacy and confidentiality are protected.

Adapted from: https://newatlas.com/medical/personalized-medicine-benefits-concerns/