Individualized medicine improving health care

ROCHESTER, Minn. — How is individualized medicine working? Let us count the ways.

Mayo Clinic Vice President Dr. Gianrico Farrugia recently highlighted five areas in which the knowledge and know-how from the human genome will be most influential in patient care, not just at Mayo Clinic, but anywhere in the nation and globally.

“What’s in it for you?” he asked a crowd of health providers at a conference on the subject at the Mayo Civic Center in Rochester, Minn. “Individualized or precision medicine offers help for your medical practice today. You can take advantage of these advances to help your patients, to better diagnose, treat or prevent illness right now.”

Here is his short list of “value adds” to the practice of medicine. There are many more, but these are the most pervasive and applicable at the moment.

• Preventing drug-related adverse affects: Pharmacogenomics — prescribing medications based on a person’s genomic information — is helping physicians avoid harmful reactions. As Mayo has embedded its available patients’ genomic information in the electronic health record, more than 3,500 adverse reactions have been prevented in the last two years.

• Microbiome markers to predict disease susceptibility and outcomes: The microbes in your gut and elsewhere in and on your body can tell physicians if you are at greater risk for some diseases and indicate how well you’ll recover from them. They can also be used to treat disease.

• Whole exome sequencing for undiagnosed diseases: By sequencing the core elements of the genome, physicians can offer some patients a diagnosis after years of questions and ineffective treatments.

• “Liquid biopsies” — Cancer mutation/biomarker testing for diagnosis and prognosis: We are rapidly getting to the point where we can use sequencing of cell-free DNA in body fluids to diagnosis and follow cancers without needing tissue from the cancer itself.

• Noninvasive prenatal testing: Cell DNA testing is now available for a variety of genetic alterations during pregnancy.

Farrugia also encouraged all sectors to become involved in precision medicine so it can continue to grow and help save lives.