MT #3: Personalized Health Care

Personalized health care is an overarching framework for proactive, personalized healthcare that provides individuals with a personal health plan to maximize their health and minimize disease. Personalized health care is an approach that applies the concepts of systems biology to medicine and is personalized, predictive, preventive, and participatory (so called P4 medicine).  Personalized or precision medicine initiatives seek to enhance medical interventions by leveraging various data types, including biological information and biomarkers. It utilizes predictive technologies to establish each individual’s health risks and facilitates patients’ engagement in their health along with the development of plans and a care delivery system designed to achieve the best health outcomes. Personalized health care is based on the established principle that each individual is born with unique biological characteristics based on their genetic inheritance. Thanks to access to individual's current clinical status and subsequent possibility of evaluation of their risks of disease it is possible to entirely change the approach to health care. This new approach deviates from the original focus on identifying and responding to disease to more sophisticated strategic approach whereby disease risks are quantified and, where possible, prevented by strategic planning. This new approach termed, “personalized health care,” is based on the scientific foundation of systems medicine that recognizes the dynamic relationship between genetic inheritance, environmental exposures, and systems biology. There are a number of challenges associated with personalized medicines, especially with respect to obtaining their approval for routine use from various regulatory agencies. In addition, there are many issues associated with the broad acceptance of personalized medicines on the part of different health care stakeholders, such as physicians, health care executives, insurance companies, and, ultimately, patients. Almost all of these challenges revolve around a need to prove that personalized medicine strategies simply outperform traditional medicine strategies, especially since many tailored or personalized therapies can be very expensive. There exist convincing strategies that proved that personalized medicine protocols and strategies could outperform traditional medicine protocols and strategies. Despite the progress in personalized medicine there are still challenges associated with personalized disease prevention, personalized health monitoring, and personalized treatment of overt disease. In fact, there are emerging and next-generation personalized medicine strategies that attract attention of scientists. These strategies include the use of patient-derived cell and organoid ‘avatars’ for determining the best suitable therapies for that patient, the use of intense individualized diagnostic and monitoring protocols to detect signs of disease, the development of personalized digital therapeutics, and the use of personalized medicine approaches in treating patients with fertility issues. There are many benefits of the application of this approach especially in terms of medical benefits or health outcomes. Basically, it deals with improved outcomes in the areas of prevention, diagnosis, treatment and palliation of chronic and non-chronic diseases, and expanded understanding of determinants of health, social and economic impacts as economic opportunities, health system efficiencies, human capital gains, and well-being and other social benefits and eventually better function of the health systems.

Miroslav Špaček on behalf of MT#3

UWB, Pilsen