Is Precision Medicine the Future of Cancer Treatments?
Cancer is a dangerous disease that takes the lives of thousands of patients every year. Due to several complexities, standard treatment options such as radiation or chemotherapy are not effective for every patient.
Tumors present in cancer patients may express different types of proteins in different patients. Due to such challenges, there has been a constant demand for the development of precision or personalized medicine that can help experts in choosing better care options.
This article will help you in understanding in-depth concept of precision medicine and its commonly used techniques that help experts in cancer treatment.
Introduction to Personalized or Precision Medicine
Precision medicine is the procedure used by healthcare experts in choosing specific care and treatment options for patients based on the genes present in the cancer cells.
It also helps experts in understanding the chances of getting cancer to a particular patient by examining their gene change.
If the patients have already been affected by cancer, then precision medicine procedures help in knowing, how these gene mutation in cancer cells of the patients may affect the treatments options.
On the other hand, this approach also helps patients in making better decisions related to healthy habits, getting an early screening test, and taking more effective steps that can lower the chances of getting cancer.
Promising Advantages of Precision Medicine
The concept of precision medicine is new but holds several promising advantages that can help healthcare experts in multiple ways.
Following are some advantages precision medicines can offer:
- Better Care Option for Patients
Making accurate decisions related to cancer treatment options is difficult so much so that even doctors can’t tell the accurate effect of the treatment on a particular individual.
By choosing precision medicine approaches, experts can have a better idea for the treatment. Every decision made using the precision medicine approach is based on specific elements affecting patients’ health.
It allows experts to understand the possible effect of the treatment on the patient’s body and accordingly select the better treatment option.
- Cost-effective
Targeted treatment done using precision medicine based on individual genetic changes can help in reducing the cost of care with better and more effective treatment decisions.
· Mass Diagnosis
Understanding genetic patterns and changes in a whole population with the help of precision medicine approaches can help in the development of better and more effective treatments for diseases such as cancer.
It can also help in predicting the probability of cancer in the patients with the help of early detection.
The above-mentioned advantages of precision medicine is attracting several investors. Also, it is being adopted at a massive rate by the healthcare sector to get better ways of treating cancer. Due to such a high adoption rate, the market of oncology precision medicine is also witnessing massive growth.
Market Overview of the Oncology Precision Medicine
Today different precision medicine initiatives, oncology centers, and precision treatments to patients based on individual genetic profiles are focusing more on diseases such as cancers.
As per BIS Research, the market value of the global oncology precision market was at $451.74 billion in 2020 which is supposed to touch $128.89 billion by 2031, with a CAGR of 10.05% during 2021–2031.
Request your FREE sample report on the global oncology precision market
The factors boosting the growth of this market are:
· Increasing cases of cancer
· Decreasing trail-based drug prescription
· Rising usage of predictive biomarkers for diagnosing cancer
· Massive technical advancements connected to oncology precision medicine
Precision Medicine Techniques
Precision medicine is generally performed using techniques such as molecular imaging, molecular dynamics, and molecular diagnostics for getting the required information about the diseases.
- Molecular Imaging
Molecular imaging helps in the drug discovery procedures by capturing the biological process at cellular and molecular levels.
It helps an expert in getting a deep understanding of the present protein structures, molecular processes, and cell function in humans.
Also, this technique helps in providing a detailed view of the healthy and the unhealthy tissues in the human body. Due to this, the role of molecular imaging in precision medicine becomes much more crucial, especially in cancer management.
- Molecular Dynamics
Molecular dynamics refers to a computational method that predicts the effectiveness of the drug with the targeted proteins responsible for causing diseases.
In reference to other techniques, molecular dynamics help in providing better insights about the source of the diseases. Also, this technique helps in choosing the right candidates for the drug trials to avoid waste of time.
- Molecular Diagnostics
Molecular diagnosis helps in understanding the patient’s biomarkers- mainly their genetic change and how the cells present in the body are being expressed with genes.
The technique allows healthcare experts to choose the most effective treatments or predict the right drug that can work better on the patient.
Conclusion
The precision medicine approach is helping experts in getting better knowledge by deploying advanced medical devices and choosing effective therapies that can work best for the specific patients. Early success in precision medicine approaches for the detection and treatments of cancer has shown its promising capabilities.
In the future, precision medicine can have a positive impact in the healthcare sector and allow experts to better understand the diseases.