The precision medicine revolution: putting the patient first

What does precision medicine really mean?

And how is precision medicine putting the patient at the centre of healthcare?

And if you were interested, where would you start?

In short, precision medicine - also known as stratified or personalised Рaims to ensure that the right patient gets the right treatment at the right time. However, the complexity of this evolving discipline requires the application of robust methodologies to disentangle the myriad potential markers and mechanistic pathways that might inform meaningful disease stratification.

Help is at hand with a more thorough explanation provided thanks to the Medical Research Council (MRC) and Professor Stephen Holgate, MRC Clinical Professor of Immunopharmacology, who have collated a useful guide.

The MRC framework for stratified medicine research methodology provides guidance on the analyses of these large data sets. This includes finding specific gene changes in a particular cancer, which chemical signals have gone wrong in mental illness, which parts of our immune system go into overdrive in chronic inflammatory disorders such as arthritis, asthma and bowel disease, or what causes different types of diabetes.

The MRC hope the framework provides an accessible guide for researchers who are using a precision medicine based approach in their work.

For more on this and to read the MRC Framework for the Development, Design and Analysis of Stratified Medicine Research please visit:
https://www.insight.mrc.ac.uk/2017/12/05/the-precision-medicine-revolution-putting-the-patient-first/