D. Klonoff
May 1, 2008
Citations
1
Influential Citations
31
Citations
Journal
Journal of Diabetes Science and Technology
Abstract
Personalized medicine is an emerging concept for treating diseases, which involves determining specific information about a particular patient and then prescribing a treatment that is specific for that patient.1 Personalized medicine represents an approach for defining disease subtypes and defining biomarkers that can identify patients who are most likely to benefit from a specific treatment and other patients who are unlikely to respond or likely to experience side events. Not every patient with diabetes with the same age, duration of disease, body mass index, and Hemoglobin A1c will respond the same way to a given treatment. Some patients respond to a treatment whereas others do not. The reason may be a genetic propensity to respond or not respond to a drug. The physician must assess every patient and then attempt to guess which treatment will work best. If the physician could be armed with specific personalized information about that patient, including information about their genetic makeup, then treatments could be tailored for each individual patient. This approach would then lead to better outcomes without wasting time on ineffective therapy. Outcome statistics, which indicate that a certain percentage of patients will respond to a specific treatment, are not always meaningful for a given individual. For some diseases and treatments if one treatment is used, then 100% will respond and if another treatment is used then 0% will respond and for other patients a different treatment might be 100% effective. The problem is that physicians do not know which treatment is likely to be effective in any given patient, so the treatment that works most often for the greatest number of patients is usually selected first, even though this treatment will not be effective for some patients.