Healthcare update: back to basics

It looks like personalized gene-based medicine is further away that was originally thought. To develop working therapies for most common diseases, scientists will have to collect a lot more DNA data and figure out better ways to analyze it. In the short run (3-10 years), personalized approach to medical treatment will be based on lifestyle choices, e.g. diet, exercise, stress management, etc. Though basic, lifestyle changes were very difficult to implement; they worked mostly for highly organized and motivated people. Now, with the proliferation of social networking, availability of connected diagnostics devices, and, more importantly, rising healthcare costs, it'll become easier for many of us to decide upon and implement good lifestyle choices. In any case, magic DNA bullets are not going to be ready for quite some time.

Here's an excerpt from a NYT article (3/10/10) that describes a significant scientific setback in the gene-based approach to treating diseases:

More common diseases, like cancer, are thought to be caused by mutations in several genes, and finding the causes was the principal goal of the $3 billion human genome project.

The results of this costly international exercise have been disappointing. About 2,000 sites on the human genome have been statistically linked with various diseases, but in many cases the sites are not inside working genes, suggesting there may be some conceptual flaw in the statistics.


The finding implies that common diseases, surprisingly, are caused by rare, not common, mutations. In the last few months, researchers have begun to conclude that a new approach is needed, one based on decoding the entire genome of patients.

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