652
Limitations of Personalized Medicine
Limitations of personalized medicine are shown in Table 20.8.
One of the limitations of pharmacogenomics-based medicine is that there is a lot
more to drug response than genes. Drug treatment outcome represents a complex
phenotype, encoded by dozens, if not hundreds, of genes, and affected by many
environmental factors; therefore, we will almost always see a gradient of response.
Diet, general health, and drug-drug interactions are just some of the factors that alter
a drug’s performance in a given patient. The genome is not going to give us all the
answers, just some of the answers. The other factors will need to be studied as well.
The laudable, longer term objective of personalized medicine cannot be fulfi lled
however, until one more element of diagnostic testing becomes feasible by the creation
of reliable methods to predict how an individual’s unique genetic status may predis-
pose him/her to the development of future illness. The development of disease predis-
position risk diagnostic tests that map the probability that an individual will succumb
to one or more of the complex late-onset, multigenic, non-mendelian diseases that
Table 20.5 Advantages of personalized medicine for the patients
Participation in decision- making about choice of treatment
Effective and specifi c therapies
Less risk of adverse effects
No time lost in trial and error with ineffective drugs
Lower cost of treatment
Facilitates personalized preventive healthcare
Improvement of quality of life
© Jain PharmaBiotechTable 20.6 Advantages of personalized medicine for the physicians
Avoidance of trial and error approach in selection of drugs
Rational therapeutic decisions based on pathomechanism of disease
Diagnostic guidance to treatment incorporated in personalized approach
Less complications of treatment and adverse effects of drugs
Increased professional satisfaction
Advances in medicine and translation of new biotechnologies into clinical practice
© Jain PharmaBiotechTable 20.7 Advantages of personalized medicine for the healthcare providers
Saving healthcare costs in management of chronic diseases
Reduced adverse effects and complications of treatment that will reduce cost of care
Companion diagnostics will prevent misuse of new expensive biological therapies
Improved patient compliance
© Jain PharmaBiotech20 Development of Personalized Medicine