Personalized Medicine

Personalized Medicine

By Phalonia Spears

Biology SCI 115

Professor Carol Hoban

Personalized medicine is a new field of healthcare that is based on an individual’s unique genetic, genomic, clinical and environmental information. The factors vary from one person to another just like the onset of diseases so the purpose of personalized medicine is to react to the individuals symptoms in the way, with personalize treatment. (Jain, 2007)

Personalized medicine primary goal and target is to make a treatment as individualize as the person receiving the treatment. This method involves indentifying genetic, genomic, and clinical information that will allow accurate predictions to be made about an individual’s susceptibility to a developing disease, the course of that disease and the response to treatment. (Cohen, 2008)

Modern genetic technology started with the genome project which leads to the benefits and development of personalized medicine. (Cohen, 2008) The human genome is the blueprint for each person's body, influencing how we look, our genetic predispositions for certain medical conditions, how well our bodies fight disease or metabolize food, and which therapies our bodies do and do not respond to. (Hart, 2005)

The genome consists of an organism's total DNA, including its genes. DNA—the famous "double helix"—is composed of four chemicals, which are repeated many times in different sequences (Jain, 2007). (The names of the chemicals are abbreviated as A, T, C, and G. That's why DNA is sometimes referred to as a code with a four-letter alphabet.) (Jain, 2007)The sequence of the chemicals dictates the type of organism that develops, as well as other critical life functions. The human genome contains approximately 3 billion pairs of these chemicals. (Jain, 2007)

Genes are believed to make up only about 2 percent of the human genome, with the rest consisting of "noncoding" regions, thought to regulate the function of genes and contribute to the structural...