A day is not too far away when you will be directly prescribed with personalized medicine based on how quickly your body accepts it and facilitates faster processing towards the same.
However, today's conventional medicine is quite convinced with the assumption that patients with a particular diagnostic condition should get the same first line of treatment, knowing the fact that it can only be 30-60% effective. In this regard, offering tailored therapy with the best possible response as well as the highest safety margin should be treated as the blockbuster approach. And this can be achieved through the acceptance of precision medicine or personalized medicine.
What exactly is personalized medicine?
Personalized medicine is an emerging approach for better patient management in the form of offering a cost-effective solution for the effective treatment outcome. In other words, personalized medicine can offer a move away from traditional “one size fits all” therapeutic module and further emphasize to manage the disease as per patient’s genetic predisposition and body’s capacity. The proposed new scientific discipline was being developed from the confluence of biochemical, pharmacological as well as the geneticmakeup of an individual; further seeking to understand all the cellular as well as molecular underpinnings of particular diseased conditions. Since, personalized medicine is also being identified as the precision medicine, for being an extension of traditional therapeutic approach to treat the diseased condition; but with greater understanding and with greater precision.
Thus, personalized medicine helps each patient to enable early diagnosis of the diseased condition, better risk assessments,and optimum treatment; further improving overall healthcare and reduce the treatment cost considerably.
The historical landscape of personalized medicine
Over the past decade or so, substantial evidencehave been gathered to confirm that a substantial percentage of variable treatment outcomesare dependent upon a number of factors like genetic predisposition, immunological strength of a person, age, environmental impact, stress, nutritional level, epigenetic factors,etc. It should also crucially note different patterns of therapeutic responses depending upon geographical as well as ethnical basis of a population.
Personalized medicine: The Stem CellsTheranostic?
Precision medicine, by contrast, focuses on the targeted application of a drug or another therapeutic module further allowing specific treatment outcome; with the primary goal of maximizing the therapeutic outcome and minimizing the risk of any other side effects. In particular, this approach has largely been warranted by the regenerative cellular medicine in the form of multiple cascades of interaction between infused cells and the host cells to decisively influence and accelerate therapeutic outcome.
With the advancements on basic science and technology associated with stem cell therapeutics, researchers are now working towards solving many different questions such as:
- How to translate the existing platform of stem cell research towards the therapeutic application of stem cells?
- How to optimize adequate clinical effectiveness and predictive safety, while performing stem cell therapy?
- How to precisely plan targeted delivery of stem cells, in order to facilitate better coordination of stem cells with that of the patients own cells?
- How to exploit stem cells for multi-dimensional, decisive treatment outcome?
Important properties of stem cells have implications for personalized medicines
The diminished euphoria of stem cells is forcing scientists, medical professionals as well as the general public to re-examine different types of stem cells and their unique properties that would effectively allow regeneration of lost cells and facilitate functional attributes of tissue. In this regard, researchers are working towards implementation of the transdisciplinary approach by considering all aspects of science and technology to achieve better stem cell migration at the site of injury and facilitate tissue regeneration. Some of the important properties of stem cells that can be referred to as an implication towards precision medicines can be noted herewith:
- Stem cells are immune-privileged, as in they cannot elicit any negative immune response in the patient body and prevent rejection.
- Stem cells are immune-enhancers, by promoting and regulating good immune cells that are already present in our body; and thus, help in minimizing auto-immune destruction of the targeted
- Stem cells are able to transdifferentiate into multiple cells types like bone, neurons, cartilages,and pancreatic beta cells.
- There is a possibility of both autologous as well as allogeneic therapy with the wide treatment spectrum depending upon the disease type.
Thus, the major focus and interest are towards application and exploitation of all the relevant properties of stem cells towards developing a brand-new tool for the tailored health care options based on our unique genetic as well as immunological make-up, environmental effect,and lifestyle. With the accumulation of large database and comparative analysis done on the same, both researchers and clinicians are optimistic towards the use of stem cells in personalized medicine.
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