Precision medicine is one of the ways through which health care providers can render and plan specific care for their patients. This can be done based on an individual’s genes or the genes in their cancer cells. This is also known as personalized care/personalized medicine.
What Precision medicine does is that it examines how a specific/particular gene change or gene mutation would affect an individual’s risk of getting a certain kind of cancer or if the individual is already having cancer, then how either their genes or the genes in their cancer cells may affect the treatment.
This approach makes use of the information from genetics tests that are conducted and helps the doctors put together a plan for care that entails very specific recommendations. While in a few cases, precision medicine can facilitate in taking accurate diagnosis which would help in improving the treatment, in the others, it can enable in taking decisions related to healthy habits, earlier screening tests, and numerous other steps which would help in prevention if the individuals are at risk for particular cancer.
The health care providers may not use the exact words such as “precision medicine” or “personalized medicine,” rather they may tell you regarding genetic, genomic, DNA, or molecular testing. Or they may even talk about either looking for biomarkers or getting a genetic profile. These are ways doctors as well as other health care providers may use a precision medicine approach while they are planning your care.
Gene mutations & cancer
Since Precision medicine is based on learning/knowing the effects of specific kinds of gene mutations/changes, thinking about precision medicine can be helpful in understanding what are gene mutations and how will they affect an individual’s risk or treatment for cancer.
Every cell in an individual’s body has Deoxyribonucleic Acid (DNA) that contains the genes of that particular individual. Genes are the instructions your cells leverage for building proteins that are needed for keeping the human body working in a normal way.
When a cell divides to make new cells, the genes inside that particular cell get copied. A gene change occurs when there is a mistake in the copying process and sometimes these changes are from a parent, which is known as inherited gene change. However, these changes may also happen sometime later in life – these are known as acquired gene changes. Some gene changes can be harmful, and others may not lead to causing any problem.
AI in Precision medicine
AI is leveraged in drug discovery and drug development. Various kinds of AI tools are used to predict the appropriateness of a patient for a clinical trial. This is achieved by using any number of criteria and multiple datasets from medical records to physical examination to radiology work-up.
“Numerous evolving fine-tuned applications that apply AI include precision medicine and predictive medicine - applications where treatment protocols are predicted for a given patient rather than for a group. The business applications of AI include, treasury management to customer service using bots to proper adverse event detection and reporting directly to the FDA”, says Jasmine Gorimar, Head IT, Boehringer Ingelheim.
Precision medicine in cancer
Precision medicine is used for certain cancers in order to know what kind of tests as well as treatments are best. Therefore, Doctors can use precision medicine to help them in identifying who might be at high risk for cancer, prevent a few types of cancer, determine certain cancers at an early stage, diagnose a particular type of cancer correctly, decide and select what treatment options are best, and lastly evaluate how a treatment is working.
Cancer risk and prevention
In some cases, precision medicine is used for individuals who are with certain cancers or with those who are at a higher risk for developing certain cancers. For instance, an individual may realize that cancer runs in their family, in such cases, the patient should meet with a certified genetic counselor and consider having genetic testing.
The testing will give results in which it can be found out if they have a gene change or mutation which may put the individual at a risk for certain types of cancer. If so, the doctor will recommend screening and various other tests which would help in finding cancer early, and prescribe medicines, suggest healthy habits which would help lower cancer risk.
Use of precision medicine
Although precision medicine is not used for every cancer at present, the hope is that one day, treatments will be customized as per specific gene changes in each individual’s cancer. Therefore, research is being conducted in this segment. A few of the common cancers where precision medicine is used to help with treatment decisions include lung cancer, colorectal cancer, certain types of leukemia, melanoma, breast cancer, thyroid cancer, ovarian cancer, certain types of lymphoma, esophageal cancer & stomach cancer.
Cost of precision medicine in cancer
Experts believe precision medicine will facilitate in lowering health care costs. This is due to the way precision medicine can help in guiding doctors in selecting/determining the correct tests that can further help them choose the treatments which will not only work best but also hopefully have the fewest side effects. Now, this means a patient can keep away from getting treatments that are not likely to work well.
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