The personalized medicines are also well known as tailored medicines as they made by using the individual’s own genetic information. It is a personalized approach and hence the doctors have not to worry about the fact that the medicines would suit the patient or not.
Tailored medicines are known by several names like precision medicine or sometimes as genomic medicine. The tailor medicines use the genetic information to bring about a treatment plan for the illness. The medicines are used to create individual strategies and are good for those people with some rare disorders or for those who are at the advanced stage of the disease.
The major idea of using a tailored medicine for a patient is to avoid any wastage of money as well as time on potentially ineffective treatments for all patients and also exposing them to lot of harmful side effects.
Also Read: Under-the-Counter Remedies for Migraines
Working of Tailored Medicines:
Tailored medicine plans are ‘tailored’ using the following:
- Keeping in mind and looking at the genes that can help you decide the type of drug that can work for your body
- Check the diseases area or cells to know the medicines that can help to treat the same
- Using your genetic makeup to analyze the chances of your body getting infected with a particular disease type
- Looking into your environment, lifestyle and your habits.
- Taking into consideration your diet and exercise habits
By looking into other things like diet, environment and lifestyle, you are able to better understand the conditions that might have activated your gene to make you more vulnerable towards a particular disease.
Diseases or Conditions Treated With Tailored Medicines:
A tailored medicine is thought to be of maximum use in cases of cancer and certain conditions such as:
- Certain cancer types like lung, breast and colon cancer
- HIV/AIDS is another field as each of the virus mutates differently for each patient.
- Childhood illnesses
- Cystic fibrosis
Other diseases that could be taken care of with the help of personalized medicine are heart disease, multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis and infectious diseases, etc.
With the use of personalized medicine and its advancement in the field of treating patients more effectively, the doctors will start mapping not only a group of genes, but a whole genome. The use of personalized or tailored medicine is only in its infant stage now, and the patients are not still aware of the fact that a medicine could be there that could completely be made to suit his/her type of disease and response and it will be carrying least side effects too.
Who will own the data?
With all the different data coming round the way to the screening of genomes of different people, it will become a bigger task about the ownership, privacy and access of the genetic data. The most common debate is that the patient will be the owner of his/her genetic data and it will be completely confidential.
Also Read: Side Effects of Immunotherapy
The patient will be able to keep the data with him/her and will have to deliver the content to the doctor at the time of need. This data must be accessible to the doctor on the desktop and the huge amount of data could be used by the doctor to decide the personalized medicine.
