Can Molecular Medicine Survive Its Teenage Years, and Reach its Potential This Decade?
Summary
The biggest question for the next decade is whether molecular medicine can survive its teenage years, moving from first discoveries to mature approaches enabling inexpensive, practical, and reliable clinical tools.Personalized healthcare will be predictive and preventive, probing an individual’s unique biology to assess disease probability and then designing appropriate treatments, even before symptoms.This model of molecularly-enabled, personalized medicine will become a reality in the next decade only if the following five questions can be successfully answered: Will molecular screening technologies based on genomics and proteomics be able to detect the early onset of complex diseases such as diabetes and cancer?More recently, optical, magnetic resonance imaging, and ultrasound probes have been synthesized, but they generally lack either the sensitivity or targeting specificity required for molecular diagnostics.At the start of this century, there was great hope that targeting systems could be developed to deliver drugs and modern biologic therapies (e.g., siRNA) with high specificity, sparing the side effects commonly associated with chemotherapies.