The personalized medicine: today and tomorrow

Recent genetic findings and correlated developments in genomic techniques have led to the commercialization of novel diagnostic platforms for studying disease or evaluating therapeutic results in patients. This field is known as ‘‘personalized medicine,’’ and uses the patient’s genetic structure to tailor approaches for patient specific disease detection, treatment, or prevention. Personalized medicine is embedded in the belief that since individuals have unique features at the molecular, physiological, environmental exposure, and behavioral levels, they may need to have mediations provided to them for diseases they have that are tailored to these unique characteristics. Personalized diagnostic tests are used to identify patient-to-patient differences in gene or protein expression levels, which performance as indicators for drug treatments or disease prognosis. In order, medical experts be able to better answer questions such as: ‘‘who must be treated with which drug?’’ and ‘‘How should the treatment be ordered?’’ Clinical genetic testing began over 30 years ago with the accessibility of mutation detection. Since then, the field has intensely altered to include genome sequencing and genome-wide analyses using microarrays and next-generation sequencing. The identification of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) sequence variants related with common diseases stimulated the availability of testing for personal disease risk estimation, and created commercial opportunities for direct-to-consumer genetic testing companies that examine these variants. This genetic risks, are the key components of the personalized medicine, which aims to apply personal genomic and other relevant data into a patient’s clinical valuation to more accurately guide medical management. Direct-to-consumer (DTC) DNA testing, by providing a wide range of personal genomic information directly to its consumers. These companies, illustrated by the well-established 23andMe, usually carry out an analysis of single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) using DNA extracted from a saliva sample. These genetic data are then assimilated and provided direct to the customer, with different interpretation.