Monday, July 28, 2014

Endoplasmic Reticulum Disease Clinic 3: Personalized Medicine

I received many questions about yesterday's blog describing the clinical application of a new DNA sequence technology.
http://wolframsyndrome.blogspot.com/2014/07/endoplasmic-reticulum-disease-clinic-2.html
So I would like to clarify a few things.

1. Cost
There is a lot of discussion about the cost. Will our health insurance cover this? I believe that it will be covered in the near future. To sequence all the genes in each patient is equivalent to taking the perfect past medical history and family history. So there is a tremendous value in doing this.

2. Personalized Medicine
It is critical to sequence all the genes in each patient for designing a treatment strategy. Each patient is different, and we should design a personalized treatment plan for each patient. I am designing a few treatments for Wolfram syndrome patients. One of the treatments that I have designed should work for patients who have WFS1 gene mutations, but not for patients who have WFS2 gene mutations. I have many other examples.

I hope that you will have the best week in your life! Talk to you tomorrow!