by Liam Critchley
Precision medicine is a medical approach that looks at the individual variability in genes, environment, and lifestyle for each person, and uses a customized approach to tailor either a therapy or diagnostic approach to each patient/disease. It’s the opposite of the one-size-fits-all approach that is developed for many common medicines, where they’re developed for the average person and dosages are altered accordingly depending on the ailment. Instead, it’s an area that allows doctors to better predict which disease treatments will work in certain groups of people and offers a more customized and individualized therapeutic approach for patients.
Like many modern areas of advanced and specific science, the term “precision medicine” has become a bit of a buzzword, but the concepts underpinning precision medicine have been a key part of the health and medical industry for many years. Compared to mainstream therapies, precision medicine is still not as widely used, but its use is growing as more diseases start to require a more holistic approach to treatment. Here we look at some interesting pieces of research that have manifested recently in the precision medicine space.
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