The state of personalised medicine in 2019

When researchers completed mapping the human genome in 2003, it broke new ground for what was medically possible. This work specifically involved determining the order of the four chemical building blocks that make up a DNA molecule, called “bases,” and every person has approximately 3 billion pairs of them. The order in which these bases appear reveals the genetic information that each segment of DNA carries, and for the first time, scientists were able to interpret what they meant. Personalised medicine leverages this breakthrough to offer customized, high-quality medical care to patients on an individualised basis. The “secret sauce” is in tapping the patient’s genetic makeup to learn fundamental details about who they are — things the patients might not even know about themselves. Do they have a genetic predisposition to certain health conditions? Do they have an obscure gene mutation that provides essential guidance on how to treat a medical problem?