Ask the Expert: Michael Rugnetta on Personalized Medicine

What is personalized medicine?

Well, personalized medicine can best be defined as getting the right treatment to the right patient at the right time. And in a certain sense, medicine has always strived to do that, but in this new era of personalized medicine today, what we can do is we can provide doctors with a more personalized array of tools. So it's not just about the art of medicine, where the doctor's getting to know you and examining you. The doctor's also going to have therapies and treatments that are tailor-made to someone with your specific kind of biology.

How does personalized medicine work?

Personalized medicine works all starting with biomarkers, and what biomarkers are is that they're molecular indicators of how your body operates on a very fine, specific molecular level. Biomarkers can include things like proteins, enzymes, metabolites, but the biomarkers we hear the most about are genes. And in a few years, about five to 10 years, it might be possible to have your entire genome scanned for about 100 dollars. And once we can do that, we can give it to your doctor, who can then pick from an array of highly personalized therapies, treatments, tests, lifestyle changes, to try to deliver the maximum beneficial treatment to you, the patient.

What are the challenges and possible solutions?

The challenges with personalized medicine can be broadly divided into two categories. On the one side we have research, and other side we have implementation. And they're also kind of connected, as well. With regard to research, we need to discover more biomarkers, and we need to get data on what they actually mean so we know what's going to happen with your body and with your health status when we discover these biomarkers. On the other side with implementation, we need to devise therapies, and treatments, and even drugs that are in line with these different biomarkers. And it's very difficult sometimes because we hit a catch-22 where it's difficult to do the research unless we know how we're going to implement it, and it's difficult to create a plan for implementation until we have all the research. So in order to try to avoid all of these catch-22s, what we need to do is have a constant conversation where people are always sharing their information and data, and looking for ways to collaborate. So we need to bring together doctors, academic researchers, insurers, industry, and even some patient advocacy groups, to try and see if they can all get on the same page and have an efficient process of progressive innovation that's always updating itself, reevaluating, and improving, so that we can deliver maximum benefit to the most people.