Berci Mesko is probably the hardest working blogger on the web. I don’t think he sleeps. He also is probably the best resource for all things “personalized medicine” and health 2.0. I troll his posts looking for bloggable material (and there is usually way more than I can handle). One of the best sources are his personalized genetics summaries. In a recent one he points to a quote from George Church (via Eye on DNA)
If you have cancer predisposition, you can get early diagnosis. You can get a mastectomy so you remove the tissue that’s likely to cause trouble. For stomach cancer, for colon cancer, there are various things that people do in advance. Or, you could [find out you] have a bad drug reaction, [and] you could just never take that class of drugs or food.
To me that quote is the reason why we should be/are pursuing personalized medicine, personal genetics, nanomedicine, etc. The cautionary note I would like to add to that is a simple one. Ever since the human genome got sequenced, we have been interested in seeing how we can leverage that information into making better, more targeted drugs and moving towards preventive and predictive medicine. Pharmacogenomics is almost entirely driven by that desire. However, the process of getting there is hard. We need to change the pharma development process on its head; we need to re-train a medical community trained on reductionist techniques, and we have a population that still doesn’t quite understand the impact of all these discoveries (lets not forget the costs either).
In other words, lets not put the cart before the horse. The journey has started, and we’ve even crossed a few important milestones, but the end is still some ways away.
Technorati Tags: Personalized Medicine, Healthcare
4 Comments
Deepak, thank you so much for the kind words and encouragement!
This is one of the most important and clear sentences I’ve read for a time now:
“We need to change the pharma development process on its head; we need to re-train a medical community trained on reductionist techniques, and we have a population that still doesn’t quite understand the impact of all these discoveries (lets not forget the costs either).”
I’ll definitely quote it in my next summary.
And to be honest, I hate sleeping…
Deepak, thank you so much for the kind words and encouragement!
This is one of the most important and clear sentences I've read for a time now:
“We need to change the pharma development process on its head; we need to re-train a medical community trained on reductionist techniques, and we have a population that still doesn’t quite understand the impact of all these discoveries (lets not forget the costs either).”
I'll definitely quote it in my next summary.
And to be honest, I hate sleeping…
Berci
You’re quite welcome.
I was just wondering the other day why we had to sleep, but as I get older, days with 2 hours of sleep don’t seem to cut it any more
Glad you liked the post
Berci
You're quite welcome.
I was just wondering the other day why we had to sleep, but as I get older, days with 2 hours of sleep don't seem to cut it any more
Glad you liked the post
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[...] Deepak Singh at business|bytes|genes|molecules presents a cautionary note about Your personal health. [...]
[...] Deepak Singh at Business|bytes|genes|molecules had a cautionary note: We need to change the pharma development process on its head; we need to re-train a medical community trained on reductionist techniques, and we have a population that still doesn’t quite understand the impact of all these discoveries (lets not forget the costs either). [...]
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