Imagine a world where once something useful to medicine is detected, we will be prompted to take meaningful action—from changing lifestyles to conducting medical diagnostic tests or using therapeutic agents. Imagine real-time, crowd-tested, scientifically effective, differentiated, and actionable advice-whether you are fighting cancer or just want to maintain a healthy, active life.
It’s coming. How long and how dispersed depends on measuring and monitoring a wide range of data, including traditional blood tests, genetic markers, behavior patterns, activity, sleep, and other data that we may not fully understand. But this represents the future of medical research and practice. The ability to collect and analyze various forms of information forms the basis of what I call the “patient equation”. The patterns discovered by sophisticated analysis tools will have a huge impact on our ability to map and process conditions with unprecedented precision.
Pandemic precision medicine
The patient equation represents the goal that life scientists and medical professionals have been striving to achieve for many years-to provide the right treatment to the right patient at the right time. But the Covid-19 pandemic has provided new incentives to make this paradigm commonplace. The use of technology is accelerating because it must do so. Eliminating the next threat to public health requires a new way of thinking, a new development path that uses computers and algorithms to work with patients, doctors and scientists.
Precision medicine is most closely related to rare diseases or cancers, but it also applies to infectious diseases—not to mention the thousands of persistent diseases that we must face—as the current pandemic shows. We now know that due to SARS-CoV-2 infection, the disease has multiple manifestations. The virus originally called Covid-19 may be a general term for several syndromes that the virus may cause. More time and research will better determine the underlying relationships and how to best manage them, but the idea of subtyping Covid-19 in multiple dimensions is precisely what precision medicine is here to develop with any other disease Therapies are just as important. The answers will wait in the algorithms running behind the scenes and how to turn them into actionable information.
More (data) sharing, more care
The global spread and destruction of Covid-19 has opened up historical and scientific investigations for decades to come. Despite major advances in medical knowledge and technology, our ability to understand, prevent and even control pandemics such as Covid-19 is far from the way that the Spanish flu of 1918 was controlled several generations ago.
This may sound harsh, but in general, the life sciences industry has missed an opportunity to play a huge role in helping manage and even contain Covid-19. This is the unfortunate product of the very little data shared today. There are thousands of studies around the world, and millions of patients are actively participating in them. These studies include patients with some of the most carefully curated data sets in the medical world. If we know which patients participating in clinical trials (regardless of the field of treatment) are infected with Covid-19, how much do we know about possible treatments and results? If we have a way to look at this data, look for signs and symptoms, and test hypotheses after the first patients are diagnosed, then we will not only have a potential early warning system, but also be able to better determine what is really important in diagnosing patients What is it, and the choice of therapy.
I hope this pandemic can serve as a call for action in our industry to figure out how to use these data so that we can better prepare next time. Not only can we help curb the spread of future infections, but thanks to high-fidelity and high-resolution views of individuals, we can discover more information about health management for a wide range of people. We need a better way to view research data through a broader perspective and connect with patients who voluntarily participate in research beyond the scope of the research.
To this end, we can supplement all our traditional medical knowledge with the digital trajectories we leave every day. We can use today’s amazing connectivity and computing power to determine which information dimensions are relevant and predictive of our healthy future. We can simplify the problem of trying to measure and understand all of this. We can combine the known patient paths inside and outside the research project into a map-a multi-dimensional map, of course, but a map with boundaries, delineating when and how to stay healthy, and diseases can be managed or cured. These paths, these maps, are patient equations. Our digital way of creating, collecting, and combining data on a scale unprecedented in the history of medicine will help us discover them and will help us reverse engineer them. It may not be perfect right away, nor is it in some way to automate every decision we make for our care-but it must be in a way that can improve our quality of life and longevity, which will help us get rid of this This kind of predicament is pandemic, and there are better plans for the future.
Photo: Metamorworks, Getty Images
