Dolly Dholakia

Cancer, neurodegenerative diseases, and rare genetic conditions take an enormous toll on individuals, families and societies as a whole. Earlier there were no options of treatments or cure as doctors and scientists were unable to understand the anomaly of these diseases. However, the invention of precision medicine changed everything. The Future of Precision Medicine has a promising approach in tackling diseases quickly and effectively as Healthcare is moving increasingly toward personalized approaches — tailoring treatment based on each patient’s unique disease.  For many years, physicians have customized their advice to individual criteria like age and gender, patient preferences, mobility levels, community resources, pre-existing conditions, and other mitigating situations. The distinction between a standard perceptive assessment of a difficult issue and genuine "precision medicine" is the extent to which data – particularly genomic data – is used to make decisions about specific treatment courses that may be more or less successful for the individual at hand. In the past few years, the Food and Drug Administration has approved several treatments based on an individual’s genetic makeup or genetic variants of his or her disease.

However, precision medicine is still in its infancy. Despite how far science has progressed, more work is required to make these therapies more accessible and affordable to a wider range of patients. Clinical trials must evolve as medicine becomes more precise. Clinical trial approaches are currently geared at large-scale, population-based studies. However, as pharmaceuticals target certain patient groups more precisely, these treatments are becoming increasingly individualized. Researchers have only scratched the surface of what revolutionary insights are likely hidden in the human genetic code. Genomic data is a relatively new addition to the physician's toolkit, and researchers have only begun to scratch the surface of what revolutionary insights are likely hidden in the human genetic code. Genetic testing is becoming faster and less expensive, allowing researchers to collect larger amounts of data from a wider range of patients. Researchers and providers can discover patterns in the effectiveness of particular therapies by merging this data with clinical, pharmacological, and socioeconomic information, and then using analytics to these integrated datasets.

Experts predict that the ability to be more precise or personalized in disease measurement, diagnosis, and treatment will be the Future of Precision Medicine.