Advances in genetic technology drive the future of precision medicine
Release date: 2015-03-19
Precision medicine is not a vocabulary that Americans just proposed this year. It was first proposed by the National Research Council in 2011. Previously, people have proposed the "4P medical model", namely, prediction, prevention, participation, and personalized medicine, and precision has become the fifth P.
It combines digital healthcare with big data, sometimes referred to as personalized medicine. Although the difference between the two is negligible in some areas, precision medicine emphasizes molecular level information. The starting point is the individual's genetic makeup, environment, lifestyle, and other specific information that not only predicts the individual's future health, but also demonstrates the individual's response to treatment options.
In the mid-eighties of the last century, geneticist Roden came to Vanderbilt University in the United States. He has been thinking about the question: Why does the patient's body respond differently to medication? How to use personalized information to make it Best medical decision?
For about 30 years, Roden and his team have been studying how to combine patient genetic information with electronic medical records to help patients predict the effects of medications. However, the most critical of these is genetics. Roden said that personalized medicine is not just your genetic code, it is about all factors, giving you a unique health experience.
Earlier this year, US President Barack Obama let Roden's question melt into a huge budget plan. In his State of the Union address, he said, "I hope that this country that has eliminated polio and mapped out human genetic maps will lead a new era of medicine and give correct treatment at the right time." "Tonight, I want to launch a The new 'Precision Medical Initiative' allows us to move toward the goal of curing diseases such as cancer and diabetes, as well as the individualized information we need to keep ourselves and our family members healthy."
This sounds like a historic moment. In a famous speech in the 1960s, former US President Kennedy once said: We decided to go to the moon. Not because they are simple, but because they are difficult. According to Mary Beckler, director of the Huntsman Cancer Institute at the University of Utah, the important component of the precision medical project is the sequencing of a lunar probe that leads people to the moon. Beckler believes that achieving medical breakthroughs requires visionary leadership, courage and willingness to break the limits of human knowledge. For the prevention and early detection of certain cancers, there are actually ready-made tools in our medical kits. What are the reasons for stopping?
Obama's vision of "two steps"
One day in April 1953, Crick and Watson published a paper on which they discovered the double helix structure of DNA based on the work of their predecessors, and for the first time spy on how the living body inherits and stores biological information. Today, more than sixty years later, their discovery is having a revolutionary impact.
Imagine a man who was diagnosed with a benign tumor, compared to a chemotherapy that would cost thousands of dollars and would be difficult to talk about, he would get an affordable treatment that would save his life. Today, only a small bottle of mother's blood is needed, and DNA sequencing technology can help screen for diseases such as Down's syndrome and other health conditions in the fetus.
Behind it is the deconstruction of the genetic world and the "attack" of precision medicine. In fact, precision medicine is not a vocabulary that Americans just proposed this year. It was first proposed by the National Research Council in 2011. Previously, people have proposed the "4P medical model", namely, prediction, prevention, participation, and personalized medicine, and precision has become the fifth P.
It combines digital healthcare with big data, sometimes referred to as personalized medicine. Although the difference between the two is negligible in some areas, precision medicine emphasizes molecular level information. The starting point is the individual's genetic makeup, environment, lifestyle, and other specific information that not only predicts the individual's future health, but also demonstrates the individual's response to treatment options.
According to the Obama administration's plan, the United States will allocate $215 million from the 2016 budget for precision medical projects. Of this, $130 million will be allocated to the National Institutes of Health; $70 million will flow to the National Cancer Institute under the National Institutes of Health; $10 million will be provided to the US Food and Drug Administration for the establishment of a project database Mechanism; the remaining funds will be given to the National Office of Health Information Technology Coordination to ensure that data sharing does not infringe on personal privacy.
Research firm marketing research firm Kalorama believes that the purpose of the budget is to accelerate biomedical discovery, provide clinicians with new tools, knowledge and choices for the most appropriate treatment for patients. They will be achieved through human tissue diagnosis and cell diagnosis. Among them, human tissue diagnosis includes in situ hybridization and immunohistochemistry, as well as important tests to determine drug efficacy and disease progression.
Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, said recently that the first step in achieving this "precise medicine" program is to find a way to effectively integrate the various mixed data collected in the study.
As early as 2003, Collins had successfully led an international team to begin the first sequencing of the human genome. A year later, he began a large-scale genetic study of American citizens, but it was expensive. With millions of people sequencing their genes and the cost of electronic health records dropping dramatically, and the speed of network and computer calculations is accelerating, this vision will soon become a reality.
The second major component of precision medicine is the cancer program, which will create a national “cancer knowledge network†to guide new treatments. The public agrees that it is a good time to establish a new national cancer program based on precision medicine. Molecular testing is currently being performed regularly in advanced cancer centers for breast, lung, colorectal, melanoma and leukemia patients.
All failures are not cheap
Charles Soyers, a popular candidate for the Nobel Prize in Medicine, is the director of the Human Oncology and Pathogenesis Program at the Sloan Kettering Memorial Hospital Cancer Center. He believes that the program will not only expand the sequencing of the human genome, but also help develop more drugs.
Like quite a few policies in history, Obama’s policies will be compared to previous health care bills. Potalazu, CEO of Vitalspring Technologies, wrote that doctors need a lot of data in order to grasp the disease at the genetic level. Managing this vast amount of information will require extensive planning and coordination, as well as expertise in the fields of medicine and information technology. The Obama Healthcare case lacks these three factors.
He pointed out that all failures are not cheap. So far, because the site has struggled to cope with huge amounts of data, the government has spent $2.2 billion to build and repair the site, and there are security risks. A hacker reported last year that he had obtained 70,000 personal identities from the site. Records including information. “Imagine these threats include not only name, address, and financial information, but also genetic code. The threat of theft is small compared to privacy and health.â€
Potalazu said, "Precise medical care is placed too much hope and cannot succumb to this failure." He made three major suggestions for this. First, the president must first find a strong leader, he must be able to coordinate the major mechanism. Second, leaders should implement an initiative plan to ensure the implementation of the plan. Third, the plan should not be launched together, just like the Obamacare reform bill, but should start slowly from small pilots and further expand. In this way, project leaders can ensure that technology is reliable and effective before storing the genetic and medical information of thousands of Americans.
And big data is not the biggest concern in this plan. Eric Top, a medical doctor and genomics scientist, wrote in one of his books that once all the factors that primarily affect human health "get into the computer," scientists will generate new medical knowledge at a much faster rate. accelerate. Today's computers can do tens of billions of calculations per second. As the data of the new system continues to grow, much of the knowledge can be learned quickly.
Many projects on this new research system can be combined within a few months. For example, 500,000 members of the US health care provider Kaiser Permanent Medical Organization volunteered to contribute their electronic health records and genetic data to the research database. The organization of the Army of Women, sponsored by surgeon Susan Love, has more than 375,000 women enrolled in breast cancer research. In the Million Veterans Program of the US Veterans Health Administration, 350,000 veterans have been included in the electronic genetic health record biobank sample. These cases show a large number of Americans' support for President Obama's new national research system. They also provide important experience in how these programs are implemented on a large scale, efficiently and with privacy.
However, there are still a large number of vacancies in the coverage of today's biobank samples that need to be addressed. For example, Kaiser's group focuses on the elderly population (over 60 years old). Therefore, efforts are still needed in this group of children and their health problems; the new National Child Health Knowledge System and the Child Health Research Center can help to complete the new system.
Similarly, most survey data show that Medicaid and Medicare are not sufficient for people with disabilities and special needs. There are 2.5 million people in the country, including a total of 6,800 special diseases, as well as ethnic minority groups, who can benefit from the National Data Plan. There is still much work to be done to identify the most important new types and types of data, which is part of the new national research system.
"Future Baby" experiment
Some overseas media commented that this plan is the basis of a new era of medicine, because they are beyond the "biobank sample" of the original gene, and envisioned a "all-inclusive" knowledge system. The computer calculus database can potentially consider the influence of individuals. Any factor of health. These factors can include more physiological data such as proteome, environment, lifestyle, patient subjective information, mobile devices, and sensors.
Intel co-founder and chairman Gordon Moore had a big vision in the 1960s that led to the PC revolution of the 1980s and 1990s. Moore believes that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit board will double every two years. In the past decade or so, the cost of DNA sequencing has declined 1,000 times faster than Moore's Law, from $100 million per human genome to just $1,000.
This trend of cost reduction is attracting the attention of VCs. According to TechCrunch, a US technology blog, in 2014, the reported risk of genetic technology companies increased by more than 50% year-on-year to US$687 million. In view of the increase in A-round financing by nearly 300%, the investment is expected to be this year. Continue to maintain strong growth. The data shows that as of the 9th, the total amount of venture capital in this field has reached 143 million US dollars this year.
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation recently announced that it has invested $52 million in CureVac, a German cancer vaccine developer, for its largest investment ever. The company's technology is based on RNA, which converts genes into proteins.
According to MIT Science and Technology Review, scientists are studying the method of compiling the DNA of "Tomorrow's Baby". George Church of Harvard Medical School in his maze-like laboratory, with researchers adding E. coli to genetic codes not found in nature, or trying to resurrect mammoths. He co-founded a small company that works on pig and cattle genes with a postdoctoral researcher from China. According to the report, it is possible to eliminate the disease-causing genes and inherit the repaired genes to the offspring by editing the germ cells or the DNA of the embryo itself. Such techniques may also be used to add genes that provide life-long anti-infection, Alzheimer's disease, and possibly anti-aging.
In contrast to the feat of the Americans on the moon, the first lunar man, astronaut Neil Armstrong, said, "Science has not yet conquered the prophecy. We have predicted too much about what happened next year, but what will happen in the next 10 years. But predicting embarrassment."
If the National Health Policy accepts this precision medical initiative, today's health care system – including biomedicine, medical education, diagnostics, treatments, comparative efficacy studies, quality metrics, payment systems, patient roles, medical care The humanization of prevention, the understanding of the outside world, nutrition, and the role of culture, and many other factors will usher in great changes.
Accurate Gene Technology Q&A
Q: So far, how do genetic engineering work and what are the development obstacles?
A: In general, genetic technology is now used as a bacterial carrier. Simply put, the relevant DNA segment is implanted into the organism—for example, the DNA that causes the carrot to produce vitamin A; it is implanted into a bacterium, usually an Agrobacterium, and then introduced into the organism of the desired transformation, such as rice. The bacteria act as a delivery function, implanting the DNA segment of the carrot into the rice genome.
This is a proven and reliable technology. The difficulty is to make the carrot DNA accurately achieve the desired results, which requires precise implantation into the correct position of the rice genome, but in the past there was no way to control the exact arrival of the bacteria. It's a bit like editing a book, but the method is to extract a piece from another book and then paste it into the book. You may have to repeat this process multiple times to get the desired results.
Q: What has changed?
A: Now, new technologies can edit DNA more precisely, just like editing a book with word processing software. Currently, one of the most exciting technologies is the CRISPR-Cas9. Essentially, this is a molecule that finds specific points in the genome and precisely cuts or implants DNA blocks.
The CRISPR-Cas9 technology was not invented, but was discovered in nature, a microbe that has evolved for billions of years. In a nutshell, when a creature is attacked by a virus, it will take away part of the DNA of the virus and implant it into its own genome. When it encounters the virus again, the creature can remember and counterattack it. It wasn't until 2013 that scientists discovered the way CRISPR-Cas9 works in nature, realizing that it can be a tool for genetic technology, so many uses are still being explored.
CRISPR-Cas9 is not the only new technology that makes genetic engineering more sophisticated. Another example is ZFN. As a foundation for anti-HIV technology, ZFN has progressed faster and is now in Phase II clinical trials. And so far, there is no guarantee that CRISPR-Cas9 will be suitable for human therapy. But researchers have been very excited about its ease of use.
Q: What are the main long-term benefits of more sophisticated genetic engineering?
A: We can see that agriculture will benefit a lot. Genetically engineered crops can better cope with climate change and take up less resources such as land, fresh water and fertilizer. Farmers do not have to rely too much on broad-spectrum pesticides to spray crops. Ideally, genetic engineering can improve the crop against the pathogens most likely to cause damage, which will cause the pathogen to mutate in intense reverse competition. Relevant technical applications can also be used to increase livestock production, although public sensitivity to genetically modified animals may limit this application.
In terms of treating human diseases, in view of the role of genes in a large number of diseases, precision genetic engineering is virtually infinitely possible. Precision gene editing creates an opportunity for personalized medicine that can be based on our own unique DNA. In addition, we must not forget industrial applications, genetically engineered microbes in isolation systems can create everything from drugs and biofuels.
Remarks: This article is an excerpt from an article published by the visiting scholar Mark Linus of the Cornell University School of Agriculture and Life Sciences on the World Economic Forum blog. Accurate genetic technology is one of the top 10 innovations listed in the World Economic Forum's “Top Ten Emerging Technologies 2015†report.
Source: World Wide Web
We're Professional Supplier Extract Powder manufacturers and suppliers in China specialized in providing high-quality products at low price. We warmly welcome you to buy or wholesale bulk Supplier Extract Powder for sale here from our factory. For a free sample, contact us now.
Supplier Extract Powder,Supplier Extract ,Supplier Powder Manufacturer in China
Shaanxi Kang New Pharmaceutical co., Ltd. , https://www.kangnewpharmas.com