Genetic treatment

In the future, when you go for medical examination and treatment, you will have to carry "biological identity", containing your own genetic information. Based on this information, the doctor will diagnose the disease and decide the treatment. Many people believe that the diagnosis and treatment of the disease according to the genetic characteristics of each individual will open a new revolution in the field of human health care.

Exploiting gene differences

For a long time, scientists in general, doctors in particular know that each of us does not have the same level of absorption and tolerance to pharmaceuticals. A drug may work with this person but may cause side effects to others. According to a recent statistic of the French Ministry of Health, only 30% of patients using drugs are really effective. Each year, 17.8% of patients suffer from side effects from pharmaceuticals and 4-5% of those who are hospitalized for taking the wrong medicine.

In view of this fact, in recent studies, people have thought about applying the achievements in genomic decoding to explain and predict why there are different reactions of each patient beforehand. a kind of medicine. The human genome was decoded in 2003, along with the mapping of its diversity with tens of thousands of individual genetic information, encoded with different proteins and molecules. Although there are about 3 million key codes like that, but the human genome has 99.9% the same; It is the very small differences within the remaining 0.1% that regulate and hold clues about physical and chemical activities, health problems of the body. The scientific community is ambitious to delineate the entire genetic structure, maximizing the difference in each genome so that it can predict the diseases at risk and the effects of the types. medicine for a patient, they call this "personal medical solution" (personalized medicine).

Genetic healing

Gene.Artwork: Internet

In other words, future human medicine will develop in a personalized way. Instead of applying a treatment regimen to everyone who has the same disease, doctors rely on each person's genetic code to provide specific treatments for each person.

For example, in the treatment of osteoporosis, it has been found that raloxifene and alternative hormone therapy are highly effective for people with BB variants of the VDR gene, while not effective. Tell people who have bb variants. For the following subjects, alendronate is more effective.

According to geneticist Gilbert Lenoir - scientific director of the National Federation of Cancer Prevention France, this direction not only increases the effectiveness of therapies, reduces the side effects of drugs but also opens a new era for medicine as well as world medicine - the era of medical examination and treatment using the characteristics of each person's genetic code.

"Genetic differences will be used to identify the susceptibility or tendency to suffer from certain specific diseases, thereby establishing effective treatment goals" - Edward Abrahams, Alliance Director PMC personal health in Washington, USA, said - "In the future, each of us will have a biological ID card (such as a credit card or driver's license), which contains all genetic information. When going to the doctor, the doctor just gives this bio-ID card to a computer, and the details of the cardholder's personal health information are displayed on the screen as much. the risk of getting any disease, being resistant, sensitive or not responding to any group, type of medicine as well as the ability to adapt to each environment. That is, the physician will give specific treatment, suitable for each object. "

Look at the gene . prescribe medicine

Concerning genomic therapies, a new science has been introduced called pharmacogenetics, with the goal of studying the effects of drugs for each individual. According to Dr. Francois Thomas, Director of the Bioserve Biotechnology Consulting Office (France), in France alone has dozens of research projects on gene pharmaceuticals conducted. Up to now, large pharmaceutical corporations have had more than 100 types of pharmaceutical drugs on hand, and certainly this number will increase in the future.

Recently, the French Ministry of Health launched an ambitious research project: studying the genetic code of all types of cancer cells. The aim of this project is to establish a genetic code bank of more than 29 most common cancers, from analytical samples of all treatment centers across France, from which to allow set up a forecasting tool to implement specific treatment cases for each individual. It is thanks to the genetic classification of patients based on genetics, that anti-cancer drugs such as Novartis's Gleevec or Genetech's Tarceva . have become more valuable when more effective for a part of the patient has the corresponding gene group. France is also the first country to conduct free genetic testing for people living with HIV / AIDS. Newly treated patients will be tested for all two HIV genes, thereby identifying their reactions to current antiviral drugs and then prescribing medications that are appropriate for all patients. AIDS, avoiding side effects.

During the study of genomic pharmaceuticals, scientists also realized that the effect of drugs also tended to differ between ethnic groups. For example, drugs in the beta-blockers group (used to treat hypertension) have very low efficacy in blacks or Africans, but are highly effective in whites or Europeans. For the treatment of asthma, black people need a higher dose of medication than whites to reach an equivalent clinical performance. Prozac (used to treat depression) when used in black people must reduce the dose compared to white people, because that drug metabolism in blacks is slower than in whites .

Promising a lot for the patients' future, however, the gene-based healing is facing many small obstacles. For example, expensive genetic testing in the current technology context can cost millions of dollars to fully decode a genome. But optimistic scientists hope only about half a decade later, the cost of decoding a human genome could be less than $ 1,000. Add to that the fact that not many pharmaceutical corporations will invest in this area because producing a drug according to their genetic characteristics will limit the number of prescriptions per year. But this is not true for their profits. In case they accept mass production of drugs for each patient, it is likely that the price of the drug will increase because they will use the excuse that it is more effective.