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‘Personalised medicine’ plans would reduce need for chemotherapy

Personalised medicine would reduce chemotherapy use in breast cancer patients by 34% , according to a new study we conducted at Vlerick Business School.

The study shows that if women with breast cancer underwent a genetic test before treatment, the need for chemotherapy use in patients would drop.

Personalised medicine is a medical model that proposes the customization of healthcare using molecular analysis – this means that each treatment can be tailored to individual patients.

By combining data from molecular diagnostic tests with a patient’s medical history and circumstances, healthcare providers can develop targeted prevention and treatment plans.

The same study also shows that genetic tests would prevent 17.000 heart strokes every year.

Personalized medicine is not only able to deliver better medicine through better diagnosis and treatment. It also allows early detection of disease at the molecular level. This enhances the chances of early, better treatment. It saves costs to society by keeping patients out of later, more expensive treatments.

Healthcare would be much more cost-effective to society if there was an investment shift from the ‘hospital based in-patient’ modality, to a ‘physician based out-patient’ infrastructure. This would allow the population to be stratified more much earlier into high/low risk groups by applying a combination of digital health records, patient history and genetic testing.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Professor Walter Van Dyck of Vlerick Business School .