Precision medicine is an emerging approach for disease treatment and prevention that takes into account individual variability in genes, environment, and lifestyle.
This includes a personalised approach to cancer treatment which is tailored to the patient’s specific type of cancer. Scientists use state of the art genetic sequencing to identify key genetic and proteomic changes in a patient’s tumour.
These individual variations in genes allow doctors to allocate young patients to very focused tumour categories and prescribe treatments to their cancer’s individual makeup. As well as being more effective, highly targeted treatments are less likely to have toxic side effects.
Precision Medicine has two main goals:
- To improve the cure rate
- To reduce toxicity and so reduce the long-term effects of treatment