THE GENOMIC REVOLUTION UNLOCKING THE PROMISE OF INDIVIDUALIZED PATIENT CARE

Abstract

Conventional therapeutic strategies that fit everyone are often unable to consider the remarkable inter-individual heterogeneity in disease manifestations and drug responsiveness. This variability results in suboptimal treatment efficacy, unpredictable adverse drug reactions and significantly higher healthcare costs in all medical fields. This review covers the development, status quo, and future outlook of precision therapeutics, from the genomic biomarkers, to multiomics strategies, to targeted delivery platforms. Next-generation sequencing has led to the discovery of druggable mutations across cancers and rare diseases, and long-read sequencing has proven powerful in resolving hitherto undruggable, complex pharmacogenes. The integration of multiomics such as genomics, proteomics, metabolomics, and artificial intelligence is ushering in a new era in diagnostic precision and therapeutic choice. New modalities such as antibody-drug conjugates, HIF-2α inhibitors and functional drug testing platforms are showing impressive clinical activity in a variety of therapeutic areas. Precision therapeutics is the process of transitioning medicine from a reactive to a pro-active, predictive and genuinely personalised field. But the barriers to implementation, such as reimbursement fragmentation, regulatory disharmony, and significant diversity of genomic reference datasets, are yet to be overcome to fully realize the promise of precision medicine for all patient populations around the world