Personalized medicine is the antithesis of the one shoe fits all approach. For years, patients with similar diseases have received similar treatment. But why is the same treatment that’s successful for one patient unsuccessful for another? The simple answer is that those patients don’t have the same physical and biochemical makeup and probably have different gene sets. At its most basic definition, personalized medicine refers to using information about a person’s genetic makeup to tailor strategies for the detection, treatment, or prevention of disease based on what we know has worked for similar gene sequences in past patients. That may sound like a straightforward task, but it actually poses major scientific challenges when one considers that there are 3 billion letters in the human DNA code.

However, scientists are making great strides including the discovery of two genes that can identify which breast cancer cells will respond to a common chemotherapy drug and which will not have been revealed by Aberdeen University staff.

The breast cancer cells that were used in the study were grown in the laboratory. Now, scientists will investigate whether the genes identified behave the same way in the human body.

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