(Business Wire India; 19th June, 2014); Wincere Inc., a visionary full service contract research organization and life sciences focused consulting company today organized a panel discussion in association with International CMEs Oncology on “Precision Medicine – Trends in Oncology”, promising to revolutionize cancer research.
The platform provided some of the eminent oncologists of Asia to come and discuss the current trends of oncology and thus, generate awareness about the role of Precision Medicine which aids in better selection of disease targets and identification of patient population that demonstrates improved clinical outcomes in various types of cancer treatment. Wincere aims to resolve the complexity and challenges using big data, involving large amounts of information through data reduction techniques along with analytics that combine both genomic and phenotypic patient data.
The practice of medicine today remains largely empirical; physicians generally rely on pattern matching to establish the diagnosis based on a combination of the patients’ medical history, physical examination and laboratory data. Biomarkers are going to enable a shift from empirical medicine to precision medicine. It is conceivable that in the immediate future, we will be moving away from the concept of “one size fits all” but rather shifting to personalized medicine (meaning the right medicine, for the right patient, at the right dose, at the right time). This would result in improved patient care and reduced health care costs. The overgrowing interest in “precision medicine”, a term that couples established clinical-pathological indexes with state of the art molecular profiling to create diagnostic, prognostic and therapeutic strategies tailored for specific group of patients.
What is driving more and more the acceptance of precision medicine is the fear and need to reduce healthcare cost. Payers have an increased cost; pharmaceutical industry has a decreased market share; patients and physicians strive for drugs that are safer and more efficacious. Precision medicine will definitively bring value to the industry, reducing healthcare costs by ensuring a more efficacious and safer treatment. This will mean a departure from traditional clinical trial frameworks, to Clinical Trials focusing on a specific group of patients and that can be only achieved via a strategic innovative approach in early drug development and trial design.
The ability to efficiently store, manage, and analyse large amount of genomic and patient data will require new innovative approaches and Wincere aims to address it using Big Data. The ability to analyse genomic datasets will lead to improved understanding of disease mechanisms and therapeutic targets. Wincere will look at leveraging Big Data that employs large collections of patient records for creation of a knowledge network of diseases. This repository can be used to research and identify genetic and epigenetic factors involved in disease, thereby improving the success rate of target compounds used in treatment. This will allow making the treatment precise and personalized by narrowing down the candidate treatment therapies. Wincere aims to resolve the complexity and challenges of processing big data involving large amounts of information through data reduction techniques along with analytics that combine both genomic and phenotypic patient data.
Himanshu Kansara – Managing Director, Wincere Inc. said, “Today, with so many new cases of cancer being reported on a daily basis and so many people losing their battle to fight this disease, precision medicine offers a ray of hope. With Precision Oncology doctors are now capable of diagnosing, prevent and treating cancer through the development of treatment strategies to target specific molecular alterations for individual cases. Ultimately, the goal of precision oncology is to improve patient outcomes.” He further added, “We are committed to serving the scientific community and recognizing the importance of emerging technologies, new electronic data sources, policy changes & cross-industry collaborations within the drug development cycle to better equip the health industry and ultimately serve people.”
In conclusion, precision medicine should ensure that a patient gets the right treatment, at the right time, at the right dose with minimal or no side effects. This ultimately will change how medicine is practiced and taught in future. Despite this big promise delivered by precision medicine, the expectations must be realistic: precision medicine will not happen overnight.
