The effectiveness of medicines and remedies quite often leaves much to be desired. In the case of drugs, it appears that in 25 to 60 per cent of patients, the drug does not work properly or at all. Other treatment methods also seem to be more focused on the average patient than on the individual concerned. The importance of a person-centred approach in healthcare is widely shared and is increasingly manifesting itself in both policy and research. The term personalised medicine (or precision medicine) is often used in this context. This term is defined as providing the right drugs at the right dose at the right time to the right patient. The key to this is provided by so-called biomarkers, signalling molecules that indicate how likely it is that a treatment will work in a specific patient. For many diseases, biomarkers are not yet known. The ultimate goal of is that medical care, from prevention, diagnosis, and treatment to follow-up will be based on a patient's individual characteristics. In this context, personalised care should also be mentioned.
Connecting character
The more we know about the functioning of the human body on a molecular scale, the clearer it becomes that each individual is genetically slightly different. This implies that drug targets can also differ from one individual to another, which means that the effect of a drug differs from one person to another. Recent Dutch cancer research shows that there is a link between genetic variations and treatment effectiveness, and that a combination of multiple drugs, each serving a different targeting point, is needed to effectively fight cancer cells. However, the exact relationship between genetic variation and drug effectiveness is still largely misunderstood and requires a comprehensive multidisciplinary approach by molecular biologists, bioinformaticians, medical specialists and drug developers, among others. Non-genetic variation-based factors will also be more tailored to individual treatment - at the patient's request or otherwise. The financial impact of such tailored approaches is largely unknown and will be an important part of the question of manageability of healthcare costs.
