From the Guidelines
Precision medicine refers to a treatment approach that uses medications or therapies tailored to a specific individual's genetic profile or molecular characteristics of their disease, aiming to minimize errors and improve accuracy in medical decisions and health recommendations [ 1, 1 ].
Key Principles
The core principle of precision medicine is to maximize efficacy, cost-effectiveness, safety, access, and compliance compared to traditional evidence-based medicine [ 1 ]. It involves tailoring diagnostics or therapeutics to subgroups of populations sharing similar characteristics, such as genetic or molecular profiles [ 1 ].
Relationship with Personalized Medicine
Personalized medicine is a subset of precision medicine, focusing on using an individual's own data to gauge the efficacy, safety, and tolerability of therapeutics, and tailoring health recommendations to their preferences, circumstances, and capabilities [ 1 ].
Applications
Precision medicine has various applications, including:
- Cancer treatment: using targeted therapies such as Trastuzumab (Herceptin) for HER2-positive breast cancer, Imatinib (Gleevec) for chronic myeloid leukemia (CML) and gastrointestinal stromal tumors (GISTs), and Erlotinib (Tarceva) for non-small cell lung cancer with EGFR mutations.
- Non-cancer conditions: using medications such as Ivacaftor (Kalydeco) for cystic fibrosis with specific CFTR gene mutations.
It's essential to consult a healthcare professional for specific guidance on precision medicine, as the choice of medication, dose, and duration of treatment depend on individual patient factors and disease characteristics [ 1 ].
From the Research
Definition of Precision Medicine
- Precision medicine, also known as personalized medicine, is a strategy that allows the selection of a treatment based on the patient's genetic makeup 2.
- It involves tailoring a treatment as individualized as the disease, relying on identifying genetic, epigenomic, and clinical information 3.
- Precision medicine is about developing an individualized approach to each patient's illness, understanding how a patient's genomic portfolio renders them prone to various diseases 4.
Key Components of Precision Medicine
- Improved clinical or non-clinical methods for a more discriminating and precise diagnosis of diseases 5.
- Targeted therapies, which rely on the existence of a defined molecular target, involved or not in the pathological process, and/or on the existence of a biomarker able to identify the target population 5.
- Biomarkers of efficacy, toxicity, treatment discontinuation, relapse, etc. 5.
- Dose adjustment methods to optimize the benefit-risk ratio of the drugs chosen 5.
Benefits of Precision Medicine
- Allows for earlier disease detection via enhanced use of existing biomarkers and detection of early genomic and epigenomic events in disease development 3.
- Increases the effectiveness of existing treatments and negates the inherent problems associated with non-PM approaches 3.
- May reduce financial and time expenditure, and increase quality of life and life extension of patients 3.
- Enables proactive actions rather than reactive ones, delaying or preventing the need to apply more severe treatments 3, 4.
Applications of Precision Medicine
- Cancer treatment, where precision medicine can be used to tailor treatments based on the genetic changes that may occur in an individual's tumor 2, 6.
- Other diseases, where precision medicine can be used to predict which medical treatments will be safe and effective for individual patients 3, 4.
- Combination therapies, which can be used to enhance the therapeutic benefits of precision medicine 2, 6.