Few areas of healthcare have received more hype and achieved less real good than personalized medicine. Companies are eager to track your biomarkers or provide a personalized nutrition plan—all for a healthy fee, of course—but the truly useful personalized medicine is still a long way off.
However, the idea remains good. We are all different: in our genetics, in our microbiomes, in every detail of our bodies. And our jokes can have a big impact on our health.
Two stories from this week prove it. Almost all of us will be infected with the Epstein-Barr virus at some point in our lives, but, as we report here, genetic variants mean that some of us are less able to clear it from our bodies. This may help explain why the virus is harmless to most people, but may be behind autoimmune conditions such as multiple sclerosis in some. Similarly, some people are resistant to misfolded proteins that would otherwise cause Alzheimer’s disease.
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It is vital to identify the people whose bodies are most likely to respond to treatment
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Understanding these disease processes—and ultimately addressing them—requires an understanding of the complexity and diversity of human biology. It means gathering vast amounts of data on everything from people’s DNA to their immune systems and figuring out what mechanisms work in different people.
It also means designing clinical trials of new treatments with more caution. We can no longer simply give the same treatment to a large group of people with the disease because their responses can vary greatly. Instead, it is vital to identify the people whose bodies are most likely to respond to treatment.
We have already done this in one area of medicine: cancer. Although we refer to all types of growths as “cancer”, the reality is that they are different and require different treatment protocols. There is no “cure for cancer”, but many.
These are big challenges, but if we want to make progress in treating diseases like Alzheimer’s and multiple sclerosis, it’s time to tackle them.
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