Personalised medicine

Personalised medicine

The fact that not all patients respond to the expected benefits of medicines and some have disproportionately adverse effects from them is leading to the development of personalised medicines services. Good clinicians have always tailored treatment to individual patients’ needs, but this typically relied on trial and error. Personalised medicine can start from using biomarkers rather than clinical outcomes as surrogate markers of effectiveness and a new specialty of pharmacogenetics that aims to assess phenotypic differences in responding to and handling drugs that may account for a significant proportion of the variation in patient response. A Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology review noted that:

^·            Personalised medicine holds both promise and cause for concern. Selective treatment may limit access to those most likely to benefit, whereas following a ‘one size fits all’ approach to medical research and development may have benefited the widest number of potential patients. Nevertheless, explaining the environmental, genetic and other biological sources of human variation will alter the way diseases are diagnosed, drugs are developed, and the matching of therapeutic cells and tissues to patients.

However, economic considerations, regulation of biological tests and the speed of clinical education and training will all influence the rate and degree to which personalised medicine will be incorporated into drug development and clinical practice.