Personalized medicine can adjust medications not only to DNA, which is unchanging, but also to the dynamic response of RNA, proteins and metabolites. One study describes how a patient was treated via a “personal omics profile (iPOP), an analysis that combines genomic, transcriptomic, proteomic, metabolomic, and autoantibody profiles from a single individual over a 14-month period.”
Studies like this point to a future in which we will be able to measure a disease or an infection and a body’s response across many different variables in close to real time. A personal omics profile could thus optimize healthcare strategies not just to a particular person but to a particular person at a particular time and place.
New tests and devices will let us learn about the functioning of our own bodies and minds at an unprecedented level of detail. From better learning will come better treatments, and then better modifications and improvements. Personalized medicine will become personalized body and mind management. The future of personalized body and mind management, however, requires that the FDA be transformed from a paternalistic agency that tells consumers what they can and cannot know about their own bodies to a science-based adviser that helps people to learn about themselves for themselves.
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