Visiting your doctor? Chances are you will talk a while about your symptoms. Then the doctor will perform an examination. Then you'll likely get a prescription or a treatment plan. Take the medicine according to the directions and, all being well, you'll get better.
That's the way it's supposed to work, and in most cases, most of the time, it works pretty well. Doctors figure out the problem and patients get better. That’s been medicine for a hundred years or more.
However, some diseases are more difficult to deal with. Cancer, heart disease, and diabetes are a few of these, and they affect the lives of many people. In such cases, doctors are hard-pressed to prescribe a one-stop solution. Even if they do diagnose correctly, and prescribe the drugs that are most likely to work, the patient might fail to respond. What's going on? It's most likely genetics. Due to differences in the genetic code, the instructions for life that makes everyone unique, any one of us may or may not respond to a particular treatment.
This is genomic medicine at work. Scientists today have the technology to build a profile for each individual. It’s like a fingerprint for your genetic blueprint. The genome carries the genetic instructions that made you.
By creating a picture of the blueprint, scientists can develop a unique profile that shows how you're different. This profile can be used to characterize things about you, such as your eye color, or susceptibility to cancer or heart disease. Taken a step further, the profile can show how likely it is that you'll respond to a certain type of drug to treat a disease. That's the power of genomic medicine. By creating a profile of your genome, doctors can tailor medical treatment to individuals. This new field of genomic medicine offers ever more precisely targeted treatment regimes, raising the prospects to develop individualized treatments with greater precision than ever before.
