What Is Personalized Medicine and Why Is It Important?

Imagine receiving a cancer treatment designed specifically for your genetic makeup or a medication dosage calculated based on how your body metabolizes drugs. This isn't science fiction—it's personalized medicine, and it's transforming healthcare today. Instead of relying on generic treatments that do not consider each individual’s unique genetic profile with a one-size-fits-all approach, personalized medicine delivers what works truly for a patient.

In this blog, we explore personalized medicine, which can be also recognized as personalized healthcare, and its critical importance.

What is Personalized Medicine?

Personalized medicine, also known as precision medicine, was introduced on an article, ‘New Era of Personalized Medicine: Targeting Drugs for Each Unique Genetic Profile,’ for the first time in 1999. This concept stands for a medical approach where doctors tailor personalized care based on a patient’s genetic profile, environment, and lifestyle.

Unlike traditional medicine which applies the same treatment to all patients, personalized medicine concentrates on customizing prevention, diagnosis, and treatment for each individual. For this customization, data from the electronic health records (EHR) system, genetic tests, and real-time health monitoring are utilized.

How does Personalized Medicine Work?

Before focusing on the benefits of personalized medicine, it is important to think about this approach’s working mechanism. The core of the approach lies in a patient’s genetic and health data.

The implementation of this multi-faceted approach to patient care mainly includes:

Risk Assessment: This encompasses the evaluation of a patient’s genes, family history, and lifestyle habits to predict the predisposition to different diseases. For risk assessment, genetic testing and EHRs are used.

Targeted Prevention: As the name implies, this phase involves taking action before a disease starts. To prevent a disease, healthcare professionals can suggest personalized diets, exercise plans, or preventive medications to the patient whose risk is high in terms of the disease.

Early Detection: This is catching a disease very early, possibly before symptoms appear. Blood tests or wearable sensors can spot early warning signs and support early detection at the molecular level.

Precision Diagnosis: At this phase, the physician identifies exactly what disease the patient has and how it behaves in the patient’s body. Genetic data helps determine the specific type and best way to treat it.

Treatment: For the treatment, personalized therapy, which is tailored to the specific characteristics of the patient’s body, is used. For example, the doctor can select a particular pharmaceutical because of the patient’s genetic profile, ensuring the treatment is more effective and has fewer side effects.

Adaptive Management: This comprises ongoing monitoring of treatment response and disease progression. Through wearable health devices and check-ups, the physician can track the patient’s health in real time. During this phase, medical technology can help avoid relapse.

Why is Personalized Medicine Important?

The traditional one-size-fits-all approach has significant limitations; many patients don't respond to standard treatments or experience adverse effects that could be prevented. At that point, the advantages of personalized medicine, which aligns treatments with patients’ unique biology, come to the forefront:

Right Treatment to Right Person: Therapeutic approaches, like medications, are chosen based on patients’ unique biological needs, so these approaches work better and faster. Cancer treatment exemplifies this precision: patients whose tumors express specific genetic markers respond much better to targeted drugs designed for those markers, compared to traditional chemotherapy approaches.

Fewer Side Effects: Personalized medicine avoids treatment plans that would likely cause harm or not help the patient at all.

Earlier Warnings: Genetic testing can specify risks, like the possibility of getting a particular disease, so patients gain time to act early.

Better Prevention: Through personalized medicine, healthcare professionals can effectively detect hereditary risks, such as cancer or heart disease. Then, they can make suggestions to their patients for monitoring or preventing these risks.

Lower Long-Term Costs: By focusing on individuals’ unique characteristics, personalized healthcare helps reduce complications and hospital visits. Also, this approach can eliminate ineffective treatments. Hence, both financial and emotional costs can be decreased.

Real-World Examples of Personalized Medicine

Some real-world situations embody the importance of personalized medicine:

TMPT (Thiopurine Methyltransferase) Test: This test is a blood test checking for certain forms of a gene called Thiopurine S-methyltransferase. Doctors can direct children with leukemia to this test to choose the right dosage of medicine. Thanks to the TMPT test, the medicine’s toxic side effects can be prevented.

Oncotype DX for Breast Cancer: As a genomic test, this analyzes breast cancer tumor genes to predict recurrence risk and chemotherapy benefit. Through the test results, physicians can decide whether chemotherapy is necessary.

CYP2C19 Genotyping: This test is used to determine the patient’s potential responsiveness to blood thinner. Doctors can prescribe blood thinner or alternative drugs to prevent clotting or bleeding complications by focusing on the test results.

These examples use genetic data to optimize drug choice/dose and preventive strategies.

Conclusion

As a new kind of healthcare, personalized medicine individualizes health services by focusing on unique personal features. Within the scope of this approach, healthcare professionals can avoid trial-and-error approach and offer better solutions by using EHRs, genetic tests, and real-time data. Thanks to that, patients can receive safer and more accurate care while recovering faster.

As the benefits of personalized medicine are recognized widely, our Mobithera, Chronic Disease Management, ExerNeck, and XrCycling appear as the answers of ‘’What is personalized healthcare?’’; Mobithera, our digital rehabilitation platform, offers AI-supported personalized exercise plans while Chronic Disease Management, our Population Health Management product, provides personalized treatment directives for the management of chronic disease symptoms.

In line with our personalization-focused product portfolio, our two R&D projects also have aligned objectives; our ExerNeck presents personalized and gamified exercises to prevent neck pain while our XrCycling offers personalized bike workouts tailored to each user’s exercise goals.

At Tiga Healthcare Technologies, we believe in the importance of personalized medicine to improve both personal and public health outcomes. Through our innovative products and projects, we exemplify our personalization- and patient-centric approach, contributing to the ongoing digital health transformation.

Let’s shape a healthier future together through personalized solutions!