Precision Medicine: A Customized Medication Approach

All people are not the same but the same medicine is administered for all those patients who are not alike l as they have the only one common symptom. Precision medicine is for that group of people.

Precision medicine is a new approach of medical science in which a specially tailored medicine is administered to the patients taking consideration of various factors like their age, the environment where they live, their family history and even other factors that affect the person every day, thereby administering the best suitable medicine for an individual for a particular condition and not just the same medicine for all the patients who have only one symptoms common among them.

Getting a special medicine for every single patient is not easy work but precision medicine is.
Precision medicine was earlier called personalized medicine but the term personalized medicine is not in use anymore as it was quite confusing and often thought that personalized medicine is only for one person.

Pharmacogenomics is derived from two words, pharmacology which is, the science of drugs and genomics which is the study of genes and their functions, is a part of precision medicine where the response of the genes is studied to a particular drug. The two branches of medicine are used together to develop an effective, and safe drug especially tailored according to the person’s genes.

Precision medicine has long-term and short-term goals.

• Short-term goals basically deal with expanding the scope of precision medicine in the field of cancer.
• The long-term goals of medicine are to expand the scope of these medicine in all fields of health sciences.

Advantages of precision medicine
• Increases the chances of doctor to use the patient’s genetic and molecular information.
• Enhances the ability to predict the best treatment for a specific patient
• It improves the ability to understand the underlying mechanisms of the disease.
• It helps in preventing, diagnosing and treating a range of diseases.

Disadvantages of precision medicine
• Huge data needs to be collected from the patient
• The patient has to be aware of the family history
• Time-consuming