What does Precision medicine mean?
Precision medicine refers to a medical approach that uses individual genotypes and phenotypes for tailoring the right therapeutic strategy to the right person at the right time.
The concept of precision medicine – prevention and treatment strategies that take individual variability into account – is not new.
Blood typing, for instance, has been used to guide blood transfusions for more than a century.
But the prospect of applying this concept broadly has been dramatically improved by the recent development of large-scale biologic databases (such as the human genome sequence), powerful methods for characterizing human diseases and computational tools for analyzing large sets of data.
One of the hallmarks of precision medicine concerns the development of targeted therapy solutions. The concept of targeted therapy is driven by molecular diagnostic approaches that enable the identification of patient populations most likely to benefit from it.
Recent technological advances and lower costs have enabled the introduction of next-generation sequencing (NGS) in clinical molecular diagnostics in different health domains, paving the way for a major paradigm shift in healthcare.
An emerging challenge, on the other hand, is the complexity and size of NGS biodata and the lack of the necessary tools and data analysis platforms for increasing inference and advancing biomolecular knowledge at large.
Oncology
Oncology has been called “the clear choice for enhancing the near-term impact of precision medicine.”
New tools extract information from cancer genomes including both mutations that occur somatically (cancer genome sequencing) and functional changes that result from both these mutations and epigenetic events (gene-expression alterations in tumors).
Considering the pace of development, it is very likely that we will soon face a potentially bewildering array of probabilities guided by and grounded on NGS and other cutting-edge, high-throughput methodologies.
Assessing and acting on these probabilities in Oncology will require novel approaches to integration and presentation of different types of data, risk quantification, and communication of uncertainty.
Oncology
Oncology has been called “the clear choice for enhancing the near-term impact of precision medicine.”
New tools extract information from cancer genomes that include both the mutations that occur somatically (cancer genome sequencing) and the functional changes that result from both these mutations and epigenetic events (gene-expression alterations in tumors).
Considering the pace of development, it is very likely that we will soon face a potentially bewildering array of probabilities guided by and grounded on NGS and other cutting-edge, high-throughput methodologies.
Assessing and acting on these probabilities in Oncology will require novel approaches to integration and presentation of different types of data, risk quantification, and communication of uncertainty.
