StemCell Therapy

Ritu Jha-

Prasun Mishra, founding President and CEO of the American Association for Precision Medicine (AAPM) says the demise of his elder sister to pancreatic cancer led him to this work to create awareness about precision (or personalized) medicine.

It was a kind of a calling for me, Mishra told indica at the AAPM annual meeting 2019 held this past month at the Santa Clara Convention Center. Initially I was very sad for my personal loss but eventually I realized it was not just me. Everybody is facing the same thing and has the same story and I am just one of them.

The daylong meeting was based on the theme Accelerating Precision Medicine and Transforming Patient Health. It was attended by both national and international professors, experts, and thought leaders in the fields of precision medicine, life science, biotech, MedTech and pharma.

Mishra, a serial entrepreneur is the Founder and CEO of Agility Pharmaceuticals, founded by AAPM in 2017 with a mission to save lives by accelerating the field of precision medicine through research, education, communication, and collaboration.

Mishra says it was not easy to build a precision medicine community and there was no non-profit voice before them. There were for profit activists out there but the real community message is hard to create. It was also hard to have a meaningful dialogue about precision medicine to create resources and funds.

In our community we have medical doctors, pharma executives, investors, entrepreneurs, and scientists and are pulling our heads together to solve the toughest problem, he added.

A lot of work was done in the previous decade in the field of precision medicine at the universities, even pharma companies and precision medicine come under health care but it is still in the burgeoning stage.

When asked if lifestyle is a part of precision medicine, Mishra said, It includes lifestyle and yes, lifestyle plays a big role. We are monitoring the patients health and behavior [to see] how it impacts their life [] and trying to see how we could through technology and resources predict, based on lifestyle what outcome [the patient] would have.

When asked about President Barack Obamas launch of the Precision Medicine Initiative in 2015 and the $215 million investment in the Presidents 2016 Budget Mishra gave the example said even private companies like Verily, a Google company, they are working on it and have been profiling patients lifestyle, including sleep pattern and genomics data. They have recently acquired Fitbit for $2.1 billion.

So the question is what led to the awareness of precision medicine? Technology or the growing Cancer killer disease? Mishra believes its both. Its a combination and of course there is frustration for not able to make a difference in the life of loved ones and that is the main cause.

During his presentation, Mishra also highlighted another move by Google that might help boost this growing demand, said, I think Google Quantum computers will be very good [at performing] certain tasks in the future and Quantum computers is much needed as it works much faster than regular computers.

But there are challenges, when it comes to data, Mishra stated that the problem is there are a lot of manual facts in the healthcare system and its on paper in the medical records.

Now we are trying to work together as a community and as a consortium on how can we solve that issue. So that manual data needs to be digitized or you can say the whole health care system needs big a U-Haul, and there are many hurdles and we have to move forward and solve each one at a time.

There are many hurdles still. We have a lot of unstructured data and we need defined data sets. We have to make an innovation to collect that data, Mishra said.

When asked if there is awareness of personalized medicine among the South Asian community, he said that precision medicines goal is to define the community, whether its the Indian or American community.

Based on how you respond to disease we are prone to certain things and diet and our lifestyle, and it would be good to have a community to have genomics data, some companies are working on but still we be are far behind in terms of collecting massive data. In India certain organizations are working. We could come together as a community.

Adding further he said as a community [coming] together would generate a pool of data and would help [figure out] what kind of medicine would respond to them.

Precision medicine is also about growing people, individual groups of ethnicity, community and similar genetic group and then treating and doing research. What are the common genetic factors that are missing and gained and use that knowledge to deliver the promise of precision medicine, said Mishra and added that the next 10 years, are going to be very exciting.

I have predicted that in 5 years and as technology is moving forward exponentially we could do so many things and with AI intervention, we could even detect diabetic retinopathy, Radiology, Mishra said and that would even help rural areas where there are no physicians.

The future is very bright and as a community, if we are passionate about making a difference, we will make the progress that is needed in 10 years or earlier.

Another speaker at the conference Pritmohinder Gill, PhD, Associate Professor at the Arkansas Childrens Research Institute, UAMS said the demand grew because of the growing cancer.

Cancer is the area where more therapeutic value from precision medicine has gone. It is the main beneficiary because we are able to target those particular genes in a particular individual, said Professor Gill.

But he sees a long way to go as its expansive and needs more research and both medicine and technology are very expensive.

He said a single medicine could cost $3000 per sample. Some companies commercialize and can do that for 1500 dollars and many places of academia has fewer resources and infrastructure to support new AI-based technology.

UAMS has no money, and without the growth of technology and AI and if you dont have support its very hard to say which gene is impacting you and your condition. Certainly many of the psychiatric disorders are multi-gene.

Without research, there is no understanding of what is happening. The key is research and only after research, you can take these findings to that side.

Pointing to the recent drugs approved by the FDA he said that in 2018, 42 percent of drugs approved by the FDA were personalized medicine drugs.

When asked how to reduce the cost, Professor Gill said that in Norway they have a population of 6 million and all the inhabitants in Norway have their whole genome sequencing done.

The UK is planning now and its in their database and physicians can access it for writing a prescription.

Thats basically where healthcare will move.

But Prof. Gill believes it would take 50 years because its all money and needs regulation and it depends on how the FDA is doing.

Meanwhile, Dr. Sanjeev Jain, CEO of The Columbia Asthma & Allergy Clinic who spoke at the panel, Role of Physicians Transforming Precision Health says precision is useful in helping to customize the treatment plan for each individual when doing allergy immune therapy.

He said he had lots of data but not enough resources, so he is looking forward to collaborating with Stanford University to build a joint database.

Currently the database is going to be focused on food allergies. Hopefully in future we can do it for other diseases, said Dr. Jain.

View post:
Is Precision Medicine the Future of Healthcare? - indica News

This entry was posted on December 6, 2019 at 8:45 pm and is filed under Personalized Medicine. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed. |