Tailor Made Medicines: Styling Drugs for Individual Systems
It’s far more important to know what person the disease has than what disease the person has.
– Hippocrates
It is no new fact that Individual response to drugs varies by a high degree even in a population related very closely. With the growth of biomedical research, pharmaceutical industries, and the rise of data mining and statistical analysis in medicine it can be more accurately established that different patients react vastly differently to the same drug even in controlled environments. Most diseases now defy our current ability to estimate a patient’s prognosis for therapy. These circumstances imply that physicians have been forced to adhere to a less-than-ideal method of recommending medications and other possibilities for treatment. Further, the heavy use of “Universal Antibiotics” (Broad Spectrum Antibiotics) in the 20th century has fueled the development of new and potent antibiotic-resistant bacteria and pathogens. In general, Resistance to a substance develops as a result of evolutionary processes throughout significant time intervals, Overuse of Antibiotics and other broad-spectrum drugs has sped up these processes from thousands of years to decades. An effective solution for this would be the use of drugs targeted at a specific receptor instead of targeting a wide range of associated receptors leading to the development of resistance. Drug resistance is a major setback in cancer treatment, there have been several breakthrough discoveries of drugs that either eliminate or very efficiently retard the growth of malignant tumors, but these drugs lose their effectiveness in rather years. Cancer cells owing to their rapid proliferation develop escape mechanisms and elucidate the mechanism of these drugs rather more effectively than the drug itself.
As defined by the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), personalized medicine is the use of genomic epigenomic, exposure, and other data to define individual patterns of disease, potentially leading to better individual treatment. Personalized medicine uses two medical products: a diagnostic tool and a therapeutic item: to enhance patient results.
First and foremost, precision medicine must be compared to the effective and popular practice of evidence-based medicine, which is based on group-centered research or meta-analyses that yield mean recommendations. For outliers, this “one size fits all” strategy may not offer sufficient answers. Precision medicine may be used to better manage such outliers, which are by no means abnormal because all of us share certain characteristics with them.
All these discussions about stratified drugs don’t come without any drawbacks, current research does not produce an economically viable and feasible protocol for the development of precision biotherapeutics. The idea of analyzing an Individual and then going through complex statistical analytic processes and data recognition is both an expensive and resource-depleting process.
Nevertheless, In India, Institute of Life Sciences, DBT has undertaken significant research work in the area of Precision Biotherapeutics. The current research endeavors have yielded significant advancements in the fields of malaria parasite biology, candida vaccine development, tailored biomaterials that promote bone growth, and antibodies against the chikungunya virus.
REFERENCES:
1. Paving the Way for Personalized Medicine FDA’s Role in a New Era of Medical Product
Development
2. National Research Council (US) Committee on A Framework for Developing a New Taxonomy of Disease. Toward Precision Medicine: Building a Knowledge Network for Biomedical Research and a New Taxonomy of Disease.
3. Knowles L, Luth W, Bubela T. Paving the road to personalized medicine: recommendations on regulatory, intellectual property and reimbursement challenges. J Law Biosci.
4. Beckmann JS, Lew D. Reconciling evidence-based medicine and precision medicine in the era of big data: challenges and opportunities. Genome Med.
Abhisek Patra
University/College name : Bhaskaracharya College of Applied Sciences , Delhi University