Oliver Sacks has terminal cancer. If you have not yet read his heart-warming Op-Ed piece in the New York Times and if you only have five-minutes to spare, then I suggest you read his essay rather than this blog about “experiments of nature” in drug discovery. In his essay, Dr. Sacks concludes with the poignant sentence: “Above all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure.”
So why do I blog, tweet, etc. given the potential risk? I enjoy the public exchange of ideas because, as Dr. Sacks write, that is the essence of our “sentient being”. I enjoy a network of inter-related ideas for which I can create unique connections.…
For our website, we have chosen the term “precision medicine” rather than “personalized medicine”. A recent News article in Nature Medicine reinforces this concept (see here).
I have had many of my non-genetic physician colleagues comment to me: “We practice personalized medicine every day. It’s called basic patient care!” Their point: physicians see patients and make decisions about the best course of treatment based on patient preferences. For example, one RA patient may prefer to have a drug infusion once per month and another patient may prefer to take a pill each day.
The Nature Medicine article emphasizes “the idea that molecular information improves the precision with which patients are categorized and treated“. While personalized medicine might say “patient X with disease Y should get drug Z”, precision medicine says “patient X has a subset of disease Y — actually, disease Y3, not disease Y1, Y2 or Y4 — and patients with disease Y tend to respond more favorably to drug Z”. Said another way bt Charles Sawyers, an oncologist at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York: “we are trying to convey a more precise classification of disease into subgroups that in the past have been lumped together because there wasn’t a clear way to discriminate between them“.…