Realizing Personalized Medicine Through Integrative Medicine, Science and Technology

Patient response rates to chemotherapy are fairly low in cancer treatment, often due to human diversity and cancer heterogeneity. For almost all other diseases, the current population-averaged therapeutic approach is also hampered by the human diversity. Therefore, personalized medicine is necessary to improve treatment efficacy/response rate as well as safety by providing precisely tailored patient therapy. In this first GRC on "Personalized Medicine", we will review what we have achieved and how we should move forward.

Combinatorial treatment comprised of drugs, immunotherapy and radiations are commonly used in treating cancer, infectious disease and many other types of diseases for improving therapeutic outcomes and reduced drug resistance. Current methods are far from optimal. In addition, these combinatorial treatments will also vary from patient to patient.

Recent technology developments have enabled the precise determination of which medicines may be most effective for a group of patients with similar gene profiles. Guided by the patient's sequence database, the genotypic precision medicine (GPM) method can locate better targets for discovering new drugs and achieve much higher efficacy to improve response rates.

The major challenges of continually evolving set of genetic and epigenetic factors can render drug resistance. Based on the measured end-point phenotype of a specific patient, the emergence of phenotypic personalized medicine (PPM) can realize unprecedented levels of adaptability to the dynamic patient physical response and rapidly home in the optimized combinatorial therapy for individual personal level.

Current nano/micro technologies enable single cell sequencing, circulating tumor cell analysis, and ultrasensitive diagnosis. By converging GPM, PPM and nano/micro technologies, rationally designed optimal combinatorial therapy for a specific patient through integrative medicine, science and technology will be the next paradigm for personalized medicine.