Personalized medicine is the goal of delivering the right medicine to the right person and at the right time. Personalized medicine, as it’s frequently talked about, relies on genomic or genetic information about the individual to understand how their genetic make-up is different from individual to individual.

Identify Each Individual's Behavior for the Complete Personalized Medicine

The limitation in trying to reach the goal of having a unique medicine for every individual for every disease is simply not practical. It’s not practical from a research perspective nor is it practical from a pharmaceutical or diagnostic perspective.

The reality of how patients behave is that they do respond differently, and these responses can be organized into groups. The first step to improving healthcare is to identify what those groups look like, how to cluster individuals within a group and then manage the behavior in terms of the clinical response of that group both for diagnosis and treatment.

If we can’t get to treating patients in groups, then the hope of driving it even further into a personalized – completely personalized type of medication is going to be well beyond our reach.

Improve Healthcare by Utilizing the Technology to Understand Disease Complexities

In the recent past, much attention has been focused on the application of technology for solving the problem of personalized medicine. The application of technology means we can do genome-wide sequencing and then associate those sequence differences with diseases. In this scenario, the emphasis is on applying the technology to get the sequences of more and more individuals and not on looking at the clinical presentation to understand how complex the disease itself is.

Although genome sequencing technologies have been effective in helping researchers better understand some diseases like diabetes, there exist many more complex diseases such as autism or depression that vary greatly in both progression and symptoms. We need to understand all the complexities of these diseases in order to significantly improve healthcare.