By Kevin Loria
What we think of as modern medicine will look like primitive guesswork as we start to understand the factors that make a treatment perfect for one person yet completely ineffective for another.
“So much of medicine is just based on the average patient,” Dr. Eric Green said in an interview at Smithsonian magazine’s “The Future is Here” festival. “There are so many cases where you’ll give a medicine to somebody and you know there’s a 50-50 chance the medication is either not going to work or it’s going to make them sicker and yet you know that 50% it’s going help.”
Precision medicine could change all that, letting doctors prescribe treatments specifically tailored to each patient based on genetic information and other factors that make individuals unique, rather than rolling the dice with drugs that work most of the time or — in the cases of some cancer treatments — only a small fraction of the time.
After all, diseases and people are both incredibly complex. We might have a drug that barely slows the growth of a common type of lung cancer in the vast majority of the population but eliminates it completely in a tiny percentage of people.
Finding and understanding the medically relevant intricacies that are unique to each individual will not be easy. The Precision Medicine Initiative, announced by President Barack Obama during this year’s State of the Union address, is a massive national project that plans to delve into the specific biology of diseases and the genetic code of individuals so we can figure out what form of treatment works for each person.
