Precision Medicine for Cancer: A Perspective

Precision medicine is rapidly gaining attention as a potential approach to therapeutics to oppose the conventional “oneâ?sizeâ?fitsâ?all” approach of classical pharmacotherapy. Conventional approaches suffer from lack of efficacy, and ignore the heterogeneous nature of diseases and the variations among individuals’ genetic make-up. Precision medicine aims to categorize individuals into subclasses on the basis of differences in their predisposition to a particular disease.  Precision medicine uses majorly genetic biomarkers along with personal data to design treatments for classified individuals as mentioned above. Precision medicine has two protagonists, namely pharmacogenetics and genomic medicine. Genomic medicine is based on analyzing the polymorphic variations among the sequences of individuals’ DNA, and using the same to predict the efficacy and harmful side-effects of any targeted therapeutics. Pharmacogenetics is the tailor-made synthesis of pharmaceuticals based on available genetic information

Author(s):   Shampa Sen

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