Patients & Advocates
Providing Personalized Medicine with Molecular Imaging
Molecular imaging is revolutionizing the practice of medicine and is critical to quality health care. Molecular imaging delivers on the promise of "personalized medicine"—it can provide patient-specific information that allows treatment to be tailored to the specific biological attributes of both the disease and the patient.
Molecular imaging shows how specific tissues are functioning, as opposed to conventional diagnostic imaging procedures, which provide anatomical/structural pictures of the body's organs and tissues. It is an invaluable way to obtain medical information that would otherwise require surgery or more expensive diagnostic tests or simply be unavailable. Molecular imaging is making a sweeping impact on health care—paving the way for a new generation of personalized drugs for Alzheimer's disease, heart disease, diabetes, schizophrenia and many other diseases.
With molecular imaging, abnormalities may be detected very early in the progression of a disease, often before medical problems can be detected by other diagnostic tests and even before symptoms occur. Such early detection allows a disease to be treated early when there may be a more successful outcome.
Drugs of the future will be designed for diseases that are defined at the molecular level, and treatment will be based on the detection and monitoring of abnormal molecular processes using biomarkers and imaging. This level of specificity provides critical information not only for initial diagnosis but also to determine the most effective therapy for each particular patient. In addition, molecular imaging will enable physicians to monitor treatment in real time to evaluate exactly how well an intervention is working and if changes are needed.
Furthermore, the data provided by molecular imaging will lead to faster, cheaper, and better drugs—providing cost savings and better patient care.
Molecular imaging will make lower cost screening of at-risk populations possible, allowing the most appropriate and effective individual treatment at the optimum time. For example, using molecular imaging to determine cancer's "molecular signature," will allow doctors to select the most effective treatment as early as possible in the course of the disease, ultimately improving a patient's care and outcome.
While all humans are genetically similar, there are tiny differences in our DNA, making us unique in terms of health, disease and how we respond to treatments. The fundamental principle of personalized medicine is that differences among individuals—genetic, environmental, diet, exercise, etc.—play a role in health and disease. These variations are a reason why one drug may work well for one person but not another. They can affect how drugs are absorbed, metabolized, and used by the body.
Personalized medicine uses each person's unique genetic profile in the detection, treatment or prevention of disease. Personalized medicine is possible because new, powerful technologies can analyzes biological events at the molecular level, even before symptoms appear. The promise of personalized medicine is a future where disease is detected at the earliest possible time, and treatments are tailored to an individual patient's genetic profiles.
Personalized medicine will
- allow for better diagnosis and earlier intervention,
- facilitate drug development,
- initiate improved therapies,
- allow better medication choices,
- offer safer dosing options and
- decrease health care costs.
