Good Disruption: Episode 7 - Personalized Health

For many patients battling disease, working with their doctors to find the most effective treatment can be a painful exercise of trial and error. What if you could more precisely choose medications and customize treatment based on people’s genes, environment, and lifestyle?

 

Today, this type of customization is possible thanks to the Human Genome Project, which published the full sequence of the human genome in 2013. The release of this data provided clinicians the opportunity to identify genetic variations of thousands of diseases and has led to the rise of a new way to treat patients through personalized or precision medicine. Yet, creating a detailed and complete view of individual patients requires an incredible amount of computing power and there are concerns around accessibility, profiling, discrimination, and privacy with access to personal data.