- Since the beginning of recorded history, healthcare practitioners have striven to make their actions more effective for their patients by experimenting with different treatments, observing and sharing their results, and improving upon the efforts of previous generations.
- Currently, more than fifty percent of prescribed drugs fail to treat/cure disease due to underlying genetic traits in patients. In North America, there are over two million serious adverse drug reactions per year due to genetic diversity, which lead to 100,000+ deaths and $100 billion+ in costs
- Becoming more accurate, precise, proactive, and impactful for each individual that comes under their care has always been the goal of all clinicians, no matter how basic the tools at their disposal.
- But now, modern physicians and scientists are now able to take this mission far, far beyond the reach of their ancestors with the help of electronic health records, genetic testing, big data analytics, and supercomputing – all the ingredients required to engage in what is quickly becoming truly precise and personalized medicine.
- Precision medicine, also commonly referred to as personalized medicine, is one of the most promising approaches to tackling diseases that have thus far eluded effective treatments or cures. Personalized medicine helps solve the problem by enabling medical professionals to individually base diagnoses on molecular data rather than solely on physiological symptoms. This allows for targeted delivery (e.g., delivering therapeutics to only the diseased cells within the body) and preventive rather than reactive care.
