A number of startup companies are working to change medicine from its "one-size-fits-all" ways to more tailored approaches, CNET reports.
"This is the future of medicine," says Massimo Cristofanilli from Northwestern University. "There is no turning back. The technology is available and there are already so many targeted therapies."
CNET notes that, so far, personalized medicine has made some headway in oncology where sequencing tumors has enabled clinicians to select drugs that target the specific mutations a patient has. At the same time, CNET says companies are trying to exapnd upon this to predict the meaning of certain genetic or epigenetic mutations. For instance, Deep Genomics is using artificial intelligence to predict what gene mutations lead to disease while Epinomics is connecting epigenetic changes to diseases like Alzheimer's to guide treatments.
However, CNET notes that it is still early days for personalized medicine, especially outside of oncology. "Precision medicine has been very promising in oncology," the University of Kentucky's Jose de Leon adds. "But we know a lot more about cancer and how it works. In psychiatry, it's much harder because we don't know enough about how the brain works."