Page 7 - 22-0424

The International Journal of the Royal Society of Thailand
Volume XI - 2019

Prologue

Advances in precision medicine

Narattaphol Charoenphandhu 1,2,3,4

Precision medicine—in contrast to the one-treatment-fits-all scheme of
clinical practices—is a cutting-edge customizable medical model that precisely
treats the cause of disease. Specifically, medical diagnosis, treatments and
managements are customized or tailored for each patient or subgroup of
individuals. Thus, patients are expected to receive specific treatments based on
their genetic and epigenetic background, and how their genes, transcripts and
proteins interact with intracellular and extracellular environment. Precision
medicine is sometimes referred to as personalized medicine or stratified medicine
in many textbooks and literatures.

Although genomic technology is of utmost importance for precision
medicine, several omics technologies, including proteomics, metabonomics/
metabolomics, physiomics, glycomics and microbiome sequencing, as well as
some other emerging disciplines, e.g., molecular imaging, artificial intelligence,
robotics, systems biology and synthetic biology, contribute to foster advancement
of precision medicine. Indeed, a number of disciplines in social sciences and

humanities—for instance, medical ethics, legal science and science of legislation—
are also involved in the development and maturation of precision medicine.
Ones may realize that our genome and the expression profile of our genes are
considered as classified personal data, which are protected by law.
The applications of precision medicine are quite diverse, ranging from
tailor-made or personalized drug development, diagnosis, intervention and

treatment. In pharmacogenomics, high-throughput genomic screening and
next generation sequencing can reveal polymorphic variants of certain genes
(e.g., cytochrome P450 genes) that affect drug catabolism; therefore, physicians

1 Center of Calcium and Bone Research (COCAB), Faculty of Science, Mahidol University, Thailand
2 Department of Physiology, Faculty of Science, Mahidol University, Bangkok 10400, Thailand
3 Institute of Molecular Biosciences, Mahidol University, Nakhon Pathom 73170, Thailand
4 The Academy of Science, The Royal Society of Thailand, Dusit, Bangkok 10300, Thailand

Narattaphol Charoenphandhu 1

11/7/2565 BE 13:26
_22-0424(001-004)1.indd 1 11/7/2565 BE 13:26
_22-0424(001-004)1.indd 1