Two technological advances are converging that promise to provide a level of personalized medicine never before possible.Affordable mapping of individual human genomes will provide a more nuanced view of an individual’s genetic makeup, while the collection and analysis of patient records will show how individuals fit within a larger context. Both this micro and macro view of patients and groups of patients will arm care providers with new information that will lead to better diagnoses and treatments.Great strides have been made in the study of the human genome in the last ten years—from the initial mapping of a single human genome twelve years ago to just $1,000 today.With such affordable genome sequencing in their arsenal, healthcare providers will be better equipped to identify the potential for discovering the diseases and conditions that lurk in the genes of their patients long before a person exhibits symptoms or other detection methods can find them.At the same time, the ongoing revolution in electronic patient records, analytics and big data is allowing researchers and healthcare providers to get an ever-clearer picture of populations and individuals. New databases such as the CancerLinQ, which started as a pilot by the American Society of Clinical Oncology in March 2013, will provide real-time date from millions of patient records. Aggregated and searchable by physicians, the database will enable healthcare providers to target the treatment of cancer in their patients based on the responses of other patients with similar characteristics to their own treatments. Version 1.0 is set to launch at the end of this year.Such precise monitoring of treatments across groups of patients is normally available only to individuals who participate in clinical trials. But these trials encompass only 3-4% of all patients and generally exclude those with multiple conditions, for example, those suffering from diabetes and heart disease as well as cancer. Big data promises to provide a sort of virtual clinical trial to patients by correlating their data with others with similar sets of conditions to fine-tune treatments that the data show are particularly effective across these unique populations.Together, the advances in molecular biology enabled by affordable genomics along with big data will soon open a new era of precision medicine tailored to the individual and to groups of individuals. Of course, this increase in the available amount of data on individual patients raises privacy and security concerns that must be addressed, perhaps with new regulations.
Originally published August 4, 2013. Updated in April 2015 to reflect latest figures and developments.
This article is published in collaboration with GE LookAhead. Publication does not imply endorsement of views by the World Economic Forum.
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Author: Michael Belfiore writes for GE LookAhead.
Image: An employee works in a laboratory. REUTERS/Baz Ratner.
