People with the same condition can respond differently to the same treatment. This is why personalised treatment is so important in all fields of medicine, including psychology.
If you were destined for dementia in your 60s, but there was nothing you could do about it, would you want to know?
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Cancer researchers dream of offering personalized treatments to patients. Can they get there using the same math that drives Netflix recommendations?
Cancer precision targeting at the Systems Biology and Cancer Metabolism Laboratory. Credit: Systems Biology and Cancer Metabolism Laboratory.
Fabian V. Filipp
A field called epigenomics looks at chemical modifications that do not change our DNA sequence but can affect gene activity. What are the limitations, and can biomedicine use this to our advantage?
Tools of diabetes treatment almost always include improved diet and regular exercise.
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Diabetes, which afflicts 29 million people in the U.S., remains a difficult disease to treat. Read how an algorithm devised by MIT researchers could help.
What could genomic medicine do in the future?
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Although genomics research has the potential to revolutionize medicine, it has limitations. It may not do much to prevent many of the leading causes of death.
Blood is drawn from an unidentified patient during a routine exam Thursday, Dec. 8, 2016 at a Boston area medical clinic.
AP Photo/Dwayne Desaulniers
Lowering the threshold for FDA approval and feeding the agency less rigorous information will increase the likelihood of approvals of unsafe or ineffective drugs and devices.
Obama annually welcomed students to the White House with their Science Fair projects.
AP Photo/Susan Walsh
The outgoing president leaves behind some solid accomplishments in the world of science, tech and medicine. But the biggest departure from his predecessors might have been in his approach.
A mother holds the foot of her premature baby. Prematurity is the most common cause of neonatal death globally.
UNICEF Ethiopia/2012/Pudlowski
In developed countries, the main causes of preterm deaths are well known and studied.But in low resource countries, the causes are much less understood.
Precision public health can make a huge difference to people across Africa.
Albert González Farran, UNAMID
Precision public health has the potential to transform the global health sphere by ensuring that the right interventions are brought to the right people in the right places.
We should heed concerns about how private genetic data banks are used and accessed before we enable a system where the future of public genetic research lies in private hands.
How much privacy are we willing to give up in the name of cutting-edge science? And do we care about the kinds of research that will be done with our donations?
Next-generation genomic research depends on study participants sharing their biological materials with scientists. But concerns over how that information is protected may hold some people back.
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.
Professor of Breast Cancer Research, Institute of Health and Biomedical Innovation and School of Biomedical Sciences,, Queensland University of Technology
Dean of the College of Pharmacy, Distinguished Professor of Pharmacy and Medicine, and Director of UF Health Personalized Medicine Program, University of Florida
