Personal Genomics - Use of Personal Genomics in Predictive and Precision Medicine

Use of Personal Genomics in Predictive and Precision Medicine

Predictive medicine is the use of the information produced by personal genomics techniques when deciding what medical treatments are appropriate for a particular individual. Precision medicine is focused on "a new taxonomy of human disease based on molecular biology"

Examples of the use of predictive and precision medicine include inherited medical genomics, cancer genomics and pharmacogenomics. In pharmacogenomics genetic information can be used to select the most appropriate drug to prescribe to a patient. The drug should be chosen to maximize the probability of obtaining the desired result in the patient and minimize the probability that the patient will experience side effects. Genetic information may allow physicians to tailor therapy to a given patient, in order to increase drug efficacy and minimize side effects. As of Oct 2012 there are 167 examples of drug gene pairs for which this information is currently useful in clinical practice and this number has been growing rapidly.

Disease risk may be calculated based on genetic markers and genome-wide association studies for common medical conditions, which are multifactorial and include environmental components in the assessment. Diseases which are individually rare (less than one in 200,000 people affected) are nevertheless collectively common (affecting roughly 8-10% of the US population). Over 2500 of these diseases (including a few more common ones) have predictive genetics of sufficiently high clinical impact that they are recommended as medical genetic tests available for single genes (and in whole genome sequencing) and growing at about 200 new genetic diseases per year.