“Precision Medicine”: The Next Frontier of Medicine?

             Imagine going to the doctor’s office and getting instructed on how to live the healthiest life possible. This is personalized medicine. Now, imagine visiting a doctor who already knows all of the possible diseases that you are more likely to have. These tidbits of information, the medication, surgeries, and healthy lifestyle, are all imbedded in your genome. The infamous Craig Venter set out to decode the genome. In the 1990s, he created an agenda to unravel and translate the entire human genome in order to save the lives of thousands of people. However, with any big plan that can potentially change the world, adversaries are sure to follow.

            

             Venter was focused on his agenda of discovering and publishing the genome, but academia politics clashed with his efforts in order to fulfill the business side of the competition of human genomics. Originally, Venter worked for the government-funded Human Genome Project (HGP). However, James Watson, the leader of the HGP at the time, dismissed Venter’s numerous attempts to implement a new system of faster genome decoding, known as the genome shotgun method.  After Venter left the HGP and constructed his own company, Celera, Venter utilized his method and his system essentially worked until his coworkers realized the program for connecting the DNA strands together had a tiny glitch in the program.  Even with such a minute detail as one line of code, this program caused Venter’s valiant efforts to quickly decode the human genome to a halt. It is truly fascinating how decoding the human genome does not rely solely on the biology of DNA but on the program that is utilized in stringing together millions of base pairs the DNA fragments that were processed.

            Venter often changed between wanting to decode the genome for monetary gain and academic gain. However, Venter’s initial thought was that the sequencing would be used to determine whether or not a person is predisposed to certain health ailments and what treatments would provide the best results. As James Shreeve wrote in his book The Genome War, even Venter sequenced some of his genome and found that he was susceptible to heart attacks, so he started taking medication to help prevent it.

            While personalized medicine may be considered what occurs today (i.e. going to a doctor's appointment for your personal health), I believe Venter wanted to revamp what personalized medicine is. In his State of the Union speech for 2015, President Obama coined the term “Precision Medicine,” which is essentially personalized medicine with a little oomph. I believe that the new frontier of medicine is being able to prevent the onset of degenerative diseases by decoding patients’ genome. A doctor does not essentially know what is occurring in a patient’s body other than by conducting tests. By sequencing a patient’s genome and determining what health detriments the patient is predisposed, doctors will have a better understanding of how to proceed with a complicated diagnosis and, in the end, provide better care for their patients.

            I am excited about the future of personalized medicine. However, I have some reservations. If genotyping was typical in normal doctor’s appointments, given this tremendous amount of information about their life, will people, as a result, not live their life to the fullest? Would they be wary that any moment could be their last before the onset of a currently incurable disease, such as Huntington’s disease or Alzheimer’s disease, and think the worst of each possible outcome? Should insurance companies be allowed this information? Overall, will this information be too much for patients to handle?

Sources:

Shreeve, James. The Genome War: How Craig Venter Tried to Capture the Code of Life and Save the World. New York: Ballantine, 2005. Print.