This month, I want to talk about something that spans all stages of the research process: the concept of precision medicine. Precision medicine is more broad than a specific stage of an individual study. Rather, it’s a research area, a kind of study, or a clinical approach to managing a disease.Â
It has implications across all four stages of the research process above—from influencing study design, to refining recruitment of participants, informing approaches to data analysis, and impacting communication of and future use of the research results.
Precision medicine, also known as personalized medicine, is an approach to preventing or treating a disease that is tailored to an individual’s circumstances. Those circumstances can include things like the person’s symptoms, genes, environment, and more.Â
In the context of research, a precision medicine study is typically one that focuses on understanding and treating a particular subtype of a disease. It can identify things that will indicate whether a drug will be effective for an individual or investigate how well a drug works in a specific group of people. A common example of precision medicine being used today is the use of different medications for different types of breast cancer, which is based on specific molecules that are present (or not) on the breast cancer cells.
With ME/CFS being such a complex disease that involves numerous systems in the body, precision medicine is an important component of work trying to improve patient outcomes. While we hope for and are trying to identify a cure for ME/CFS, simultaneously researching precision medicine approaches to treating the disease may help significantly improve quality of life.
At OMF’s Melbourne ME/CFS Collaboration, the team is conducting a precision medicine project called Personalized Treatment Trials (PTT). This study is following a general practitioner as they trial different medications based on a participant’s clinical presentation. The team will collect in-depth data from before, during, and after each treatment to understand biological-symptom dynamics and hopefully lead to better personalized management of ME/CFS in the future. Read more about the PTT project on our website.
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