Personalized Medicine and Genetic Therapy: Revolutionizing Healthcare, One Genome at a Time
Imagine sitting in your doctor's office, and when you walk in, you find that the treatment you are going to get is tailored to respond to your unique genetic makeup. Those days are gone and never coming back again. A new enabler has emerged for the young to take healthcare into an innovative approach—this method is personalized medicine and powered by advancements in genetic therapy. Such inventions will shift the emphasis from one size fits all to a try with a more accurate, tailor-made approach that promises better results and lesser side effects. Let us take off into how personalized medicine and genetic therapy are reshaping the face of the future.
- What is Personalized Medicine?
Personalized medicine refers to tailoring healthcare treatments and interventions on the basis of a person's genetic profile, lifestyle, and environment. Essentially, it is based on the basic principle that every individual is unique, as is every individual's reaction to drug or treatment.
Traditionally, the design of treatment has been based on the average-basically what would serve most people. Not everyone, though, responds similarly to the treatment. Patients experience extreme side effects with some, while others show no signs of improvement whatsoever. Personalized medicine looks to change this by making sure the right patient gets the right treatment at the right time.
One of the most transparent applications has to do with oncology. With the aid of genetic screening, a physician can identify specific mutations which cancer in a patient has resulted. He or she can then prescribe medications, which look for those mutations to attack them, hence being more potent and less harmful. To cite a case, Herceptin is a medication discovered to target patients with a certain type of genetic mutation that can happen with breast cancer, with much better results regarding survival rates.
- The Goal of Genetic Therapy
The most prime example of personalized medicine is genetic therapy, which modifies the genes of a human subject in order to prevent or treat diseases. Gene editing stands out as perhaps the greatest breakthrough and at the vanguard of the technologies are those led by CRISPR, or Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats. Scientists can make edits on the DNA with precision using CRISPR, a tool which potentially fixes genetic defects causing the diseases in the first place.
Examples of these genetic disorders include cystic fibrosis, sickle cell anemia, and muscular dystrophy, which result from a mutation of one gene. With this, there is hope that the CRISPR for correcting these mutations will be able to provide long-term cure rather than just symptomatic control.
The year 2020 paved the way for a great success wherein the use of CRISPR for the first time in the US led to therapy for a patient suffering from the condition of sickle cell disease. For instance, this patient had lived with the painful effects of this disorder for several decades. The gene therapy essentially cured this patient. For more details, there are considerable cases studies in Nature and The New England Journal of Medicine for those interested in a more in-depth look into how gene editing cured such disorders.
- Pharmacogenomics: Personalizing Drug Therapy
Pharmacogenomics is an integral part of personalized medicine. This basically explains how genes will influence the way people react to drugs. Such knowledge enables doctors to prescribe the best medication in the right dosage for every patient depending on their genetic makeup.
For example, for some people, the rate at which others metabolize drugs is different because of the differences in genes. This simply means that the same dose of the medication would have very different effects in two people. Genetic testing would enable clinicians to predict specific drugs and the safest dose for each patient, therefore avoiding unwanted adverse effects of drugs. One among the most popular applications is pharmacogenomic testing, which has become increasingly popular nowadays in tailoring treatment plans for psychiatric disorders. For example, some antidepressant drugs and antipsychotic medications can be customized by changing the dosing according to their ability to metabolize the drugs.
- Current Developments and Future Possibilities
As a matter of fact, this is already realized in genetic therapy and personalized medicine, but tomorrow promises much more. It is just a matter of time that sequencing all the human genome will be faster and less expensive in cost. This then paved the way for scientists to identify earlier and more accurately the genetic markers for various diseases. Once it is declared cheaper, it is expected to become an ordinary part of preventive health services.
Advancements in cell therapy are also changing the possibilities of treatment. Here, an example is the CAR-T cell therapy, which has been applied for the treatment of specific types of cancers by modifying a patient's T-cells, belonging to the class of immune cells, to let them recognize and eliminate cancerous cells efficiently.
Another promising direction is RNA-based therapies. Such therapies, such as those applied to SMA, act according to a change in the level of gene expression. These offer not only hope for treatment of what was deemed incurable genetic diseases but also hope for those that arose from a complex interplay between genetic and environmental factors.
The marriage of personalized medicine and genetic therapy changes the modern healthcare landscape. Tailoring treatments to individuals' genetic profiles is not only improving the effectiveness of care but also unlocking the door to cures of diseases once thought to be untreatable. This is the future of medicine, and it's personal.
If it interests you to know the latest findings in this field, Cell and Genetics in Medicine are chock-full of cutting-edge research on how personalized medicine and genetic therapy are constantly evolving.
