Imagine the day when you and your doctor sit down to review a copy of your own personal genome. This vital information about your biology will enable your physician to inform you of your disease susceptibilities, the best ways to keep yourself healthy and how to avoid or lessen the impact of future illness.
This is a very exciting time in Genomics. Scientists are on the brink of discovering the genetic factors in diabetes, heart disease, common cancers, high blood pressure, asthma, mental illness — virtually any disease that tends to run in families.
In the past, the diagnostic classification of a cancer was based on the organ or tissue location, such as liver or breast cancer. But now, the many forms of cancer can be characterized by their molecular profile. These molecular characteristics provide new information on how rapidly the cancer might spread or how it might respond to specific treatments.
The use of personal genetic information to predict disease susceptibility and guide proactive care has the power to transform our entire healthcare system.
Advocates of personalized medicine have stressed its potential to:
Provide advanced screening for disease
In the future, knowing one's genetic code will allow a person to make lifestyle and environmental changes at an early age to avoid or lessen the severity of a genetic disease. Advance knowledge of susceptibility will allow for careful monitoring and early intervention.
Select safer, more effective medications and dosages
Knowledge of a patient's genetic profile will allow a doctor to prescribe the most effective medication with least amount of side effects. The profile will also show how well the body metabolizes allowing doctors to determine the safest and most effective dosage. Prescribing drugs with little or no side effects will increase patient compliance.
Create better vaccines
Vaccines made of genetic material, either DNA or RNA, promise the benefits of existing vaccines without the risks. They will activate the immune system but will be unable to cause infections. They will be inexpensive, stable, easy to store, and engineered to carry several strains of a pathogen at once.
Lower health care costs
Proactive lifestyle changes, early detection and treatment, decreasing adverse drug reactions, the number of medications patients must take to find an effective therapy, and the length of time patients are on medication are all expected to promote a net decrease in the cost of health care.
Are We There Yet?
The field of personalized medicine is still in its infancy and the day when everyone has access to their own personal genome is still a long way off.
Finding the genetic factors that predispose someone to disease, and how they are likely to respond to different treatments may be determined not by one gene but by many genes interacting with each other. Combing through this complicated genetic map is expensive and time consuming.
It currently costs millions of dollars and takes many months to sequence an individual genome. It is imperative that we greatly reduce the cost and increase the speed of human genome sequencing; then, and only then, can the promise of personalized medicine be realized.
This is the goal of the Archon X PRIZE for Genomics.
