Dr Leonard Fromer on the Promise of Precision Medicine

Precision medicine shows great potential in helping patients get personalized interventions for many conditions, said Leonard M. Fromer, MD, FAAFP, executive medical director of the Group Practice Forum.

Transcript (slightly modified)

Will precision medicine be present in all disease states eventually, or are there some that won’t benefit from precision medicine?

There’s always going to be things, I think, where it doesn’t matter very much; might be because the agents we use to treat that condition would just be divided into children and adults and pretty much 100% of the children or adults given the right dose will respond. And those things will probably be down the path of time before they become part of the precision medicine initiative.

But there are others, all along the way there, that it will matter greatly to subdivide much more than just, a child gets this dose and an adult gets that dose, in terms of how much medicine somebody should get. There will be differences discovered in how they metabolize those medicines, absorb those medicines, how it impacts receptors in their body driven by their genetics mostly. And then there’ll be patients who don’t respond at all to some things, and will respond to others, and knowing which to use first is really delivering great care with great value, great triple aim.

And understanding that will come out of the precision medicine initiative of researching, do we have the right algorithm to analyze why should this person get a different intervention than that person? Based on their genetics, based on their social milieu, based on their comorbidities, and everything we put into that equation about what makes them unique.