What is precision medicine technology?
Precision medicine technology applies customized technological methods targeted to patients based on their genetics, biological processes, biomarkers, lifestyle, and overall health patterns. These methods analyze the natural complexity of the disease, aiding in the development of individualized healthcare plans for patients. Personalized healthcare plans correspond to the analysis of the patient's genetic predispositions, genomics, and epigenetic factors. Thus, physicians have a deeper insight into how specific drugs or specialized medical treatments affect individuals. Precision medicine technology enhances standard clinical diagnostic practices by combining routine patient health data with advanced tools like molecular profiling, genomics, DNA sequencing, and regenerative medicine.
Healthcare organizations can leverage new precision medicine technologies to increase scientific and medical knowledge of disease pathogenesis, advancing new methodologies in predicting patient health outcomes when applying medical treatments. Medical practitioners can create precise healthcare plans for patients based on quality evidence of biological traits that increase disease risk. Clinicians can also look at genomic expressions within individuals to examine patterns that show a high probability of adverse drug reactions or any other genetic disposition that can affect chronic care treatments, i.e., cancer. Precision medicine technology gives structure to patient data – ethnicity, environment, biochemical, and genetic – obtained and applied to target individual health problems and develop early treatment regimes.
Examples of precision medicine technology include:
- Deep clinical phenotyping: Abnormalities in the physical expression of genes can be analyzed by computational methods, allowing researchers to compare phenotypic data using algorithms easily. Comparing large sets of phenotypic data helps build databases that understand genomic variations within phenotypes, giving researchers a deeper understanding of disease behavior within individuals. Deep phenotyping analyzes phenotypes on a granular level, increasing knowledge of how their biological behavior affects gene expression and disease outcomes in individuals. This allows researchers to understand the characterizations of mutations that lead to Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease. Deep phenotyping builds an understanding of gene regulation in mutated cells. In combination with advanced analytics, it can help medical researchers and clinicians understand the underlining dimensions of disease expression in patients.
- Digital biomarkers: Digital biomarkers is the collection of patient biological indicators by remote health devices, sensors, smartphones, and wearables that connect healthcare technology systems. This data specifies disease risk by detecting traits in a patient's genotype and physical health. The analysis of biological data can enable artificial intelligence to give deeper insights into patient health outcomes, allowing physicians to acutely understand all the parameters of individual health determinates and make more accurate care decisions.
- Computational biology: Computational biology intersects communication technologies and biotechnology to identify, analyze, and explain biological functions. Computational models understand the workings of the biological agents and systems, allowing researchers to interpret clinical, genomic, and metabolomic data. Analyzing this biological data gives researchers new pathways to creating targeted therapies for individuals based on a molecular approach. The computational models are optimized to find markers of degenerative disease, characterize gene expression in tumorous cells, and use RNA-seq analysis to look for gene mutations.
- Modeling and simulation: This technology uses data sets, such as biomarkers, to create a feedback loop based on the workings of molecular information. It produces insights into how important compounds innovate drug development. The feedback loops provide information on molecular factors likely to correlate to disease formation within specific cells. Researchers can create and study different drug designs and test their efficacy based on patient subsets that best represent their overall health profile. Patient subsets classify patients based on genetic and physical traits, helping researchers understand how drug dosage levels affect pain or disease outcomes. Modeling and simulation technology can help optimize the cost of drug development by providing metric-driven methods that enhance clinical drug research.
- Liquid biopsies: Liquid biopsies analyze genetic information, proteins, vesicles, and microbiomes to determine if cancer cells are activated. Liquid biopsies use one blood sample to detect genetic and biological markers that show the potential for mutated cell activity. Advanced analytics and machine learning tools harness data from patient records, helping physicians understand who benefits from liquid biopsies to detect early stages of diseases like Alzheimer's. These quick screening biopsies can spot abnormalities in biological markers, like mutations in gene expression or epigenetic DNA changes, and pinpoint where disease formation is likely to occur within the body. Using the information on a patient's biological markers in combination with standard clinical findings can help physicians better classify disease outcomes and begin early interventions.
- High-performance computing (HPC): High-performance computing processes data at an accelerated speed by distributing complex calculations across multiple compute nodes. When the compute nodes work together, known as parallel processing, high-speed computations can process large amounts of data and complete tasks faster. Billions of calculations are processed per second, delivering high-performance computing that aids medical research labs in developing cures for diseases. HPC assists genomics research in understanding how gene therapy methods can treat genetic disorders like cystic fibrosis and sickle cell anemia. HPC can also be used in molecular dynamics to understand better why atoms and other chemical components perform movements within specific environments. This allows researchers to understand how new drug models interact within the body to fight disease.
The benefits of precision medicine technology include:
- New drug discoveries: Precision medicine technology, like molecular imaging, make it easier for researchers to understand disease biology and its underlying mechanisms. Novel drug developments support the increased knowledge of genetic phenotypes that enable chronic disease. With a better understanding of gene expression and interactions of chemical compounds, patient populations can be categorized as to how likely a new drug will produce positive health outcomes.
- AI-powered disease models: AI can categorize genes, making it easy to understand how certain biological functions create a higher propensity for disease expression. This information generates a live map of disease, advancing research on how a particular gene function is responsible for illnesses such as heart and kidney disease. The gene can be studied within a valid biological model, mimicking gene function in a diseased state. This helps researchers pinpoint gene variants responsible for the illness.
- Biology-based healthcare: Clinicians can create highly advanced healthcare plans based on biomarker, phenotype, and genotype analysis combined with patient electronic health data. Data on a patient's unique genetic and physical makeup can help physicians build healthcare plans that align with the patient's specific health needs, helping to promote early disease detection.