Personalised Medicine. Dr Pieter Cullis.

We welcomed Dr. Pieter Cullis from the Life Sciences Institute at UBC. His topic was the future of medicine, less succinctly “The New Science of Medicine”, essentially the discipline of precision treatment  of the individual. The science is predicated upon the plain fact that the costs of treatment are simply too high given the current failure to practice preventive medicine. The future lies with molecular characterization, thereby presenting the prospect of current wastage (less than 50% of drugs actually work on the patients for whom they are prescribed) perhaps being eliminated. The drive is to give people the information that they need in their lives to make choices. The concentration in the talk – which, admittedly, was of considerable complexity – was on cancer, which is not only widespread in its effects, but a topic of increasing interest to the general population. Genetics largely account for cancer itself, thus leading to the key for this range of health matters being one’s genetic profile, and over the next few years, one person’s type of protein profile may well dictate the course of one’s life.
This personalized medicine will allow (of course, only in those societies that can afford it) far more effective preventive care than at present and greatly refine the healthcare system. Of course, to a degree it provides for very early determination of one’s life, particularly the pattern of healthcare, and as such has profound economic and philosophical implications for society in general. The uniqueness of each individual’s profile being the key to patient treatment, the accuracy of the individual’s unique molecular makeup should transform the personalized health care system.
Frankly, a challenging talk : chromosome therapy should denote the end of many of mankind’s greatest scourges.