Precision Medicine has Changed the Landscape of Healthcare

Dr. BS Ajaikumar, Chairman & CEO, HealthCare Global Enterprises Ltd.

As Precision Medicine reforms the landscape of healthcare and medical treatment around the world, experts hope to find in it what could be the finest therapeutic solution to cancer till date. This revolutionary cancer care model, while still primarily active only in research labs, offers exciting new possibilities of technology and innovation and might advance to clinical care in the near future.

Cancer has continued to baffle major research organizations, healthcare practitioners, and government bodies for decades. Estimates indicate approximately 9.6 million cancer-related deaths in 2018, amounting to 1 out of every 6 deaths globally. In India, the number of people suffering from cancer is reported to be at around 2.5 million, with over 7 lakh new cases and 56 thousand deaths yearly.

Despite conventional treatment options like surgery, radiotherapy, and chemotherapy, there seems to be a dearth of effective options for patients and healthcare practitioners to choose from. Concerns such as widely experienced side effects of cytotoxic chemotherapy and challenges in making early-stage diagnoses and predicting treatment response only add to the fear of this seemingly untreatable disease.

The inefficiency of the existing medical equipment to gain adequate information about the body’s response to drug treatment, genomic alterations of tumors, and tumor recurrence patterns press the need to intertwine data processing with customized cancer treatment planning. With precision or personalized medicine possibly coming to the clinical table in the next few years, this seems conceivable.

Laying the groundwork for a predictive and preventive health care model
hat sits at the core of precision medicine science is devising a tailor-made treatment process for each patient with detailed specifics for the right drugs, doses, medication timing, and course duration, by capturing data about his or her genetic coding, environment, and lifestyle. Laying the groundwork for a participatory, predictive and preventive health care service delivery system, it offers an effective and scalable solution to today’s healthcare problems.

Within the realm of cancer treatment, precision medicine applies the best of micro-physiological systems and gene chip technology, to garner in-depth genomic data on growth status, metastatic potential, and environmental catalysts relating to tumors. Leveraging key insights from this data, it can predict treatment outcomes, provide prognostic information and indicate predisposition, fundamentally changing the approach to cancer treatment.

The concept of personalized medicine has been brought to mass-attention by Barack Obama’s 2015 Precision Medicine Initiative. Having been under wraps for the few years before, the concept is being explored for the treatment of various chronic and life-threatening diseases. Recent evolvement in bioinformatics such as next-generation sequencing (NGS) has also revitalized its efficacy in studying genetic alterations accurately, thus making it ideal for targetting therapy for molecular cancerous tumors.

Oncologists admit that they have been subjected to some bit of ‘guesswork’ with regards to treating cancerous tumors, which have highly complex and heterogeneous gene structure. But, the capacity of NGS technology to achieve low-abundance mutations and low-level mosaicism detection, will possibly facilitate them to guide more effective treatment plans. Clinical trials directed at helping patients with rare cancer to meet the right drug have shown an initial success. However, it would take genomic probe technologies to extract furthermore data on tumor behavior, and healthcare providers to process all the information so acquired into knowledge for precision medicine to entice clinicians.

Taking a personalized and targeted approach to cancer treatment
Contrary to the ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach, expecting all patients to get similar results for similar medication, precision medicine focuses on specific treatments by getting to the root of the illness. With digitization and Internet of Things (IoT) coming together with healthcare systems, and costs of genomic sequencing dripping, personalized healthcare may soon be put out in the clinical practice space too.

This field of study cannot be pursued and mastered by one organization – the entire medical research community must collaborate to explore a more dynamic approach to fighting cancer. Patients, research participants should be willing to share their gene and/or lifestyle data and healthcare experts must be roped in to draw useful insights from such data.

Both private and public sector innovators can contribute to counter the technological, financial, infrastructural and process hassles. Academic institutions, medical centers, research organizations, governments must also come together to combine their experience and expertise and invest more time, money and efforts to support new research models that promise more prognostic than diagnostic results.