Wuanda S Green
Introduction to Biology
Dr. Russell Barnett
Personalized Medicine

Personalized medicine is a new field of healthcare that is based on an individual’s unique genetic, genomic, clinical and environmental information. The factors vary from one person to another just like the onset of diseases so the purpose of personalized medicine is to react to the individual’s symptoms in the way, with personalized treatment (Jain, 2007).
Personalized medicine primary goal and target is to make a treatment as individualize as the person receiving the treatment. This method involves identifying genetic, genomic, and clinical information that will allow accurate predictions to be made about an individual’s susceptibility to a developing disease, the course of that disease and the response to treatment (Cohen, 2008).
Modern genetic technology started with the genome project which leads to the benefits and development of personalized medicine (Cohen, 2008). The human genome is the blueprint for each person's body, influencing how we look, our genetic predispositions for certain medical conditions, how well our bodies fight disease or metabolize food, and which therapies our bodies do and do not respond to (Hart, 2005).
The genome consists of an organism's total DNA, including its genes. DNA—the famous "double helix"—is composed of four chemicals, which are repeated many times in different sequences (Jain, 2007). (The names of the chemicals are abbreviated as A, T, C, and G. That's why DNA is sometimes referred to as a code with a four-letter alphabet) (Jain, 2007). The sequence of the chemicals dictates the type of organism that develops, as well as other critical life functions. The human genome contains approximately 3 billion pairs of these chemicals (Jain, 2007).
Genes are believed to make up only about 2 percent of the human genome, with the rest consisting of "noncoding" regions, thought to regulate the function of genes and contribute to the structural integrity of chromosomes (Cohen, 2008).
In order for personalized medicine to be beneficial it must start with a series of precise diagnostic tests and targeted therapies. There are many advantages to personalized medicine which include the ability for physicians to make informed medical decision regarding a patient’s care. Another benefit to personalized medicine is the higher probability of desired outcomes which can be credit to the better-targeted therapies and reduction of negative side effects from taking medicine (Cohen, 2008). Lastly another benefit to personalized medicine is diseases can be detected earlier because of the test results of an individual’s genome (Jain, 2007).
There are some drawbacks to the use of personalized medicine, one of which includes education physicians and their patients about the limitations involved with use of personalized medicine. The medicine may have been developed to target your disease but what happens if the diseases take an unexpected turn that wasn’t discovered during your initial tests? Another drawback with personalized medicine is reorienting the pharmaceutical industry to develop and market drugs for a population based on individual needs. The medicine currently in use include a general population and it’s more so personalized to target the disease and it’s symptoms versus targeting the individuals symptoms to a certain disease (Hart, 2005). Another drawback to personalized medicine is protecting the privacy of individuals when genetic tests indicate an elevated risk for future disease. A physician could run a test that shows the patient may be exposed to the HPV virus and share that information with the patient and their family members who are present. But what happens when the medical diagnostic takes another turn, meaning the disease never takes a negative turn but now the patient along with their husband for instance has this negative information that may never happen. Or in a worst case scenario you may have a teacher that is found to go from having the HIV to full blown AIDS but again what happens if the disease takes a positive turn and the worst never happens?
There are a lot of people in favor of personalized medicine so this may be the way of the future. The information that can be obtained from a personal genome can be used to allow physicians to develop a more proactive healthcare approach based on the patient’s susceptibility to different diseases. This is the future of medicine.

References:
Cohen, N. (2008). Pharmacogenomics and Personalized Medicine (Methods in Pharmacology and Toxicology). Chicago: Humana Press.
Hart, A. (2005). Infant Gender Selection & Personalized Medicine: Consumer's Guide. Lincoln: ASJA Press.
Jain, K. K. (2007). Textbook of Personalized Medicine. Switherland: Springer.