Personalized Medicine Essay

Introduction

“The right treatment for the right person at the right time”

The concept of ‘personalized medicine’ arises out of the fact that all patients showing a particular symptom do not respond similarly to a particular medicine. This has led to the search for a more effective type of medical treatment that will respond on the basis of genetics of an individual patient. The medicine in that case will be more powerful and treatment will be more effective. Personalized medicine may be thought of as modified medical treatment to the individual characteristics, needs and preferences of each patient. Several terms, including “precision medicine,” “stratified medicine,” “targeted medicine,” and “pharmacogenomics,” are used interchangeably with “personalized medicine.” “Precision medicine” is perhaps most synonymous to “personalized medicine” and has been defined by the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) as “the use of genomic, epigenomic, exposure and other data to define individual patterns of disease, potentially leading to better individual treatment.” “Stratification”

As FDA is stressing the co-development of drug and diagnostics will initiate the pharmaceuticals and diagnostics companies to partner. This would help in the future provision of genetic testing at low costs.

CROs, CDOs, Supply Chain Vendors, Biobanks –Pharma companies will contact contract research organizations (CROs) and contract diagnostics organizations (CDOs) to outsource their clinical trials. The CDOs and CROs rely on high-quality samples from biobanks for biomarker discovery and validation studies. This requires the biobanks to provide samples with the highest quality to the research community, which means supply chain partners will play a key role in sample transport and