Though precision medicine may be hotly anticipated by the healthcare and pharma industries, it is not the only way to personalise treatment for patients.
“Ultimately we need more therapies that are better targeted to patient populations. That need has not gone away. It’s just that perhaps there are quicker wins,” says Steve Gardner, CEO of RowAnalytics.
In the next issue of PharmaTimes Gardner will speak about the challenges of making precision medicine more widespread, but he is also keen to stress that there are other, simpler ways to personalise healthcare that can help in the meantime.
“Personalised medicine the hard way is 10-20 years away in the NHS,” he says, speaking after the Life Sciences Hub Wales’ seminar on Personalised Medicine in June. “There are lots of really smart people trying to make bits of this happen in the NHS, but the mechanism for delivering personalisation at scale is not yet fully realised. It’s the sort of thing we struggle to deliver because it’s incredibly complex and we don’t have sufficient resources.
“But the most cost-effective way of treating people is for them not to get sick in the first place, or if they are sick to not suffer from avoidable drug side-effects due to drug, disease and food interactions. It’s easier and more pragmatic to adapt what we do today to make small but important differences to people’s lives.”
He continues: “You really want people to be engaged in their health, and we do almost nothing for that right now. If you get diagnosed as a pre-diabetic or a diabetic you’re given four sheets of A4 paper, stapled and photocopied a hundred times, as a nutritional guide to diabetes. And that’s it, that is the level of personalisation and engagement that you have. We’re talking about a population that doesn’t have a biochemistry degree, hasn’t studied medicine. They need tools to enable them to get educated about their disease.”
He uses the example of someone on warfarin who tries to eat well to become healthier but doesn’t realise that vegetables with high levels of vitamin K have potential interactions.
“It would be great if you could put a tool in somebody’s hand, on their phone, that says ‘for you, given your combination of diseases and drugs, here’s the problems that you’re likely to have, and to minimise them you just make a few small changes – cut these foods out, have these foods no more than once or twice a week, and the rest of it’s all fine’. That’s all you need to do.”
Gardner says these approaches could also include giving clinicians tools to look at a patient holistically, analysing the medicines they are on and identifying combinations that might cause them problems, and looking at their diet and how that might interact with their diseases and medications.
“Targeted drugs like Herceptin are brilliant,” he adds, “but they take a long time to come to market. I’m really glad they happen, but right here right now there are things that we can do that will have more impact on people’s lives.”
Read our full feature on Precision Medicine in next month’s issue of PharmaTimes
