The same medicine may react differently to different people. Some people recover quickly while some need a bit higher dose or sometimes longer time for effective results. The reason is that medicine does not respond the same way to every individual. There are a lot of factors involved that can enhance or suppress the activity of medicine in one’s body. Sometimes the pathogens show resistance to the same medicine which means they cannot be treated with the same antibiotic for a long time, which is called Multi-Drug Resistance (MDR).
Precision medicine may be the answer
To overcome this ambiguity, scientists have come up with the idea of ‘Precision Medicine’. Which is a new field combining pharmacology (study of medicine) and genomics (study of genes and their function).
Precision medicine deals with the prescription of medicine to patients that are solely designed for one genetic group taking into account the variation in their genes, environmental factors, lifestyle, and even the normal microbial flora living inside the body.
With the evolution of this new field, it is now important to better understand and study the patient’s pharmacogenomics before prescribing any dose of medicine. The pharmacogenomics will help us understand how the genes of an individual can affect the response of a particular drug in his/her body. Studying a patient’s pharmacogenomics before prescribing any drug can help the physicians and scientists prescribe and develop more effective, precise and safe medication for each particular individual.
According to Jia Ruan, MD, Ph.D., a scientist working on precision medicine from the USA, “If we could know ahead of time, we could have the treatment designed and tailored to maximize treatment effectiveness and minimize adverse events.”
Another scientist from a leading team of scientists from the USA added: “Precision medicine means to find the root cause of each patient’s unique condition and apply the best, most precise treatment.”
Looking into the future, the precision medicine for each individual is dependent on one’s genome and a few other factors but nowadays everybody can get their sequenced genome for just $1000, which can be then followed by their own personalized pills/drugs.
Author: Imtiaz Afridi
Also Read: The phage treatment: Say goodbye to Antibiotics
