Searching for a drug to treat a medical condition has always been a very standardized procedure. It involves looking for a set of symptoms that indicate a condition and a finding an appropriate drug to treat the condition. However, some conditions are very specific to a patient. This has been the premise of a recent branch of drugs called precision medicine.
Precision medicines are drugs that cure certain conditions and are specific for each and every case. The main idea revolving the concept of precision drugs is finding appropriate medicines that precisely cure a patient’s unique condition.
For instance, “doctors know a drug called Gleevec (Imatinib) works well in treating leukemia only when the cancer cells have one particular genetic makeup. So, rather than treat everyone with leukemia using Gleevec, doctors test people for that specific genetic mix and give the drug only to those who have it.” [1]
[1] Retrieved from: http://www.webmd.com/cancer/breakthrough-research-16/precision-medicine
