Personalised medicine is based on the idea that by understanding the specific molecular code of a person’s disease, and particularly its genetic makeup, we can more accurately tailor treatment.
By tampering with the machinery which allows aggressive cancer cells to adapt, we can disrupt their ecosystem.
BRCA1 and BRCA2 gene mutations prompted Angelina Jolie to have a preventative double mastectomy and surgery to remove both ovaries.
Sebastian Kahnert/AAP
What if you could take a simple test to reveal your individual risk of developing a range of cancers and hundreds of other diseases?
Precision medicine delivers treatment based on the particular variant of the disease by taking the genetic make-up of the ill person into account.
Micah Baldwin/Flickr
Hidden among all the other announcements in last week’s State of the Union address by US President Barack Obama was a promise to fund a new “precision medicine initiative”. The president said it would…
Personalised medicine is the ability to tailor therapy to an individual patient so that, as it’s often put, the right treatment is given to the right patient at the right time. But just how personal is…
Akshat Rathi, The Conversation e Declan Perry, The Conversation
Trillions of microbes live in and on our body. We don’t yet fully understand how these microbial ecosystems develop or the full extent to which they influence our health. Some provide essential nutrients…
Average life expectancy has nearly doubled since 1800, thanks to progress in medicine. Most of that was made by developing drugs and improving public health services. The medical revolution of the 21st…
These data will greatly advance our ability to identify cancers with the same or similar origins.
Image from shutterstock.com
Research published in the journal Nature overnight describes the mutations that make cancer cells grow faster than ordinary cells. These “mutational signatures” don’t just open up avenues for better cancer…
Better understanding of cancer biology is leading to small steps towards personalised cancer medicine.
Josep Ma. Rosell
Although in use for over 50 years now, chemotherapy is a blunt instrument in the battle against cancer and one that’s based on an outdated understanding of tumour biology. Personalised treatment has been…
How to best employ combinatorial optimisation for health and wellbeing … ay, there’s the rub!
Central Sussex College
Shakespeare’s plays and cancer: two seemingly unrelated topics with an underlying common thread. The techniques that computational linguistics and computer scientists use to analyse the Bard’s works are…
Patients struggling with unpleasant and debilitating gastrointestinal diseases may benefit from some of these advances.
KayVee INC
The emerging field of personalised medicine seeks to tailor therapies to suit an individual’s metabolism or genetic make-up. This strategy has worked well with medication for specific forms of breast cancer…
The biological differences between men and women extend far beyond the obvious reproductive ones.
rbrwr/flickr
Personalised medication is one of the ultimate goals of modern medicine although it’s still some way off. But the promise of gender-specific medicines means we may soon be halfway there. In its purest…