What is personalized medicine ?
- When medicine is informed solely by clinical practice guidelines, however, the patient is not treated as an individual, but rather as member of a group.
- Personalized medicine, is the use of information derived from knowing the patient as a person.
How can digital health contribute ?
- Datasets around an individual concern personal health but also factors not directly related but which can have an influence.
- Datasets can concern and individual health such as clinical images, clinical data (history…), genetic data….together these are called personomics. [unique biological characteristics are defined by the tools of precision medicine: genomics, proteomics, metabolomics, epigenomics, pharmacogenomics, and other ″- omics. ″]
- Datasets can be matched with an individual such as weather, sunshine….
Sounds complicated: an example please !
- We believe personalised medicine can help in the management of chronic skin conditions such as Atopic Dermatitis. It’s a research question.
- In order to investigate this we would like to measure the evolution of the skin condition together with other data.
- More precisely, we are working in Madagascar which is an elongated country as well as with different, climates altitude and weather.
- A lot remains unknown in the pathogenesis of Atopic Dermatitis, and subsequently in the prediction of flares.
- Clinically these are easy to note and the level of itch, sleeping disturbance and severity index evolve.
- As a research question and potentially a solution we would like to correlate the evolution of the condition with environmental data.
- It is therefore hoped that altitude, humidity, latitude, sunlight exposure, urban or rural geolocalisation can be collected. With sunlight exposure we can infer vitamin D production levels (correlate with the skin color of the subject)
