Argumentative Essay On Personalized Medicine

Engineers are developing new systems to use genetic information, sense small changes in the body, assess new drugs, and deliver vaccines.

Doctors have always known that people differ in susceptibility to disease and response to medicines. But, with little guidance for understanding and adjusting to individual differences, treatments developed have generally been standardized for the many, rather than the few.

Besides physical appearance, genes give rise to distinct chemistries in various realms of the body and brain. Such differences sometimes make someone liable or inclined to particular diseases, and some dramatically affect the way a person will respond to medical treatments.

Doctors will be able to diagnose and treat people based on their individual differences, a concept commonly referred to as "personalized medicine. “Personalized medicine is about combining genetic information with

clinical data to optimally tailor drugs and doses to meet the unique needs of an individual patient. Eventually, personalized medicine will be further informed by proteomics and metabolomics. Proteomics is the study of proteomes and their functions, and metabolomics is the study of the set of metabolites present within an organism, cell, or tissue.
“Personalized medicine,” writes Lawrence Lesko of the U.S.

Food and Drug Administration, “can be viewed . . . as a comprehensive, prospective approach to preventing, diagnosing, treating, and monitoring disease in ways that achieve optimal individual health-care decisions.”

Many doctors, researchers, and engineers have been asked, “What prevents you from creating personalized medicines now”? There are many things that interfere with them being able to create personalized medicines, whether it’s because of the expensive material needed or because of the patient’s thought on the process.

One engineering challenge is collecting and managing large amounts of data on individual patients; another is the need to create inexpensive and rapid diagnostic devices such as gene chips and sensors that are able to detect minute amounts of chemicals in the blood. If I had the ability to fix some of the challenges, I would do so immediately. For instance, in order to build inexpensive and rapid devices, I would try and reach out to some people that are willing to donate some money to help us do

so.
In addition, improved systems are necessary to find effective and safe drugs that can make full use of the new knowledge of differences in individuals. The current “gold standard” for testing a drug’s worth and safety is randomly assigning people to a new drug or to nothing at all. That approach essentially decides a drug’s usefulness based on average results for the group of patients as a whole, not for the individual. What we really need is something that can detect the usefulness of a drug on average results for the individual and not of patients as a whole.
New methods are also needed for delivering personalized drugs quickly and efficiently to inside of the body where the disease is located. For instance, researchers are exploring ways to engineer nanoparticles while avoiding the body’s natural immune response. Such nanoparticles could be designed to be sensitive to the body’s internal conditions, and therefore could, for example, release insulin only when the blood’s glucose concentration is high.
There are many benefits in personalizing medicine, not only for the patient but for the doctor as well. For the benefit of the patient, it’ll make the disease and even the risk of the disease evident much earlier, when it can be treated more successfully or prevented altogether. It could also reduce medical costs by identifying cases where expensive treatments are unnecessary or pointless. For the benefits of the doctor, it would reduce trial-and-error treatments and ensure that optimum doses of medicine are applied sooner.
I’ve talked about the improvements that have been done, and what I would do for the safety, health, and the well-being of the patients. The real question here is what role do engineers really play in making medicine better?
The challenges that engineers face right now are the development of more effective tools and techniques for rapid analysis and diagnosis so that a variety of drugs can be quickly screened an proper treatments can be applied. Current drugs are often prescribed incorrectly or unnecessarily, promoting the development of resistance without real medical benefit.
Antibiotics that attack a wide range of bacteria have typically been sought, because doctors could not always be sure of the precise bacterium causing an infection. Instruments that can determine the real problem right away could lead to the use of more narrowly targeted drugs, reducing the risk of promoting resistance. Developing organism-specific antibiotics could become one of the century’s most important biomedical engineering challenges. Which is something that engineers will be working on while trying to make medicine better for us.
In the case of a virus, small molecules might be engineered to turn off the microbe’s reproductive machinery. Viruses can be blocked by small RNAs in the same manner, if the proper small RNAs can be produced to attach to and deactivate the molecules that reproduce the virus. The key is to rapidly convert the sequence of chemicals comprising the virus so that effective small RNA molecules can be designed and utilized. This is another challenge that engineers will face while trying to design and utilize small RNA molecules.
Traditional vaccines have demonstrated the ability to prevent diseases, treat diseases, and even destroy some such as smallpox. More effective and reliable manufacturing methods are needed for vaccines, especially when responding to a need for mass immunization in the face of a pandemic.
Engineers will come across many challenges while trying to improve medicine for us. They will go through trial-and-error several times, but they will end up with amazing results, and they will improve our medicine little by little.