As politicians, patient advocates, pharmaceutical companies and doctors debate what the quality and cost of your healthcare will be in the years to come, it’s important to understand the role personalized medicine will play in the debate.
Wikipedia defines personalized medicine as managing a patient's health based on an individual’s specific characteristics, including age, gender, height/weight, diet and environment. In the future, this could also include evaluating your genetic make up and tailoring medical treatments so they meet your specific health needs. The key benefit is that it enables patients to be more proactive with their health.
Our new client, Knome is the first personal genomics company to commercially offer complete genome sequencing and analysis services to private individuals. With the information you receive from your genome, you’ll know if you’re genetically predisposed to cancer, Alzheimer's or Huntington’s disease, to name a few. And with that information, you and your doctor can treat or become proactive on therapies that can delay or deter the onset of a disease.
In a previous life, I worked at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and was able to see first-hand how advancements in biomedical research can have a real world impact on families battling both rare and common diseases. I think the more knowledge we have about our health the better, more accessible and eventually less expensive healthcare will become.
If you’re interested in how the genome sequencing/analysis process works, read “The Book of Me,” a great GQ article by Richard Powers chronicling his experience mapping his genome and how it changed his outlook on his health.
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Posted by: dissertation | July 08, 2009 at 02:41 AM