Hyper-Personalized Medicine Explained

07 September 2021 • 7 min read

CEO and Co-Founder at Softermii

Digital transformation is everywhere, and healthcare is not an exception to this rule. Although we're accustomed to perceiving this trend in process optimization and communication facilities, it has different applications to the medical field. In particular, technologies are capable of curing diseases that are commonly labeled as "helpless."

And that's what hyper-personalized medicine is all about. These days, it's an emerging trend in healthcare that already has substantial funding. By 2025, it's expected to receive $3.18 trillion from the U.S. government. The global personalized medicine market size was valued at $493.1 billion in 2020 and is expected to expand at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 6.2% from 2021 to 2028. So, it seems the future of hyper-personalized medicine is just around the corner!

But what will this future bring, and which exact technologies will it adopt? Check our hyper-personalized healthcare explained guide and see what to expect from this promising trend.

About this article

In this post, we'll provide a detailed overview of what hyper-personalization does for medicine & healthcare industry. By working with healthcare software solutions for years, we at Softermii are eager to share our knowledge and experience in this prospective field. We believe hyper-personalized medicine is a very important step in healthcare development. Thus, we encourage hospitals and individual entrepreneurs to adopt this powerful technology that relieves the pain of their patients who have already lost hope.

What Is Hyper-Personalized Medicine and How Does It Work

Hyper-personalized medicine is the set of digital tools that work with inherited genetic disorders. It refers to the invention of novel drugs capable of dealing with fatal, rare, and hopeless diseases. They are tailored to the people's genes, including gene replacement, editing, and antisense.

However, the "hyper-personalized medicine" concept has a more fundamental meaning than simply applying technology to create drugs. In essence, it turns biology itself into technology. The software can identify patients' genomes and fix their cells — which, in other words, means repairing their DNAs. These actions include drug composition and designing an appropriate regimen, dose intake, and diet.

These days, genome sequencing and CRISPR engineering are two main methods of hyper-personalized medicine. These inventions contribute to making the sphere affordable, fast, and applicable in different hospital environments. What's more, they deal with the pros and cons of hyper-personalized medicine and expand the technological potential. In short, these two trends shape the future of this innovation.

Benefits of Hyper-Personalized Healthcare

Hyper-personalized medicine brings substantial improvements to the healthcare sector, and here are its main contributions.

It’s Able to Deal with Genetic Mutations

The capabilities of hyper-personalized medicine include stabilizing the health conditions for people with unique genetic mutations. The most common tools are gene editing and replacement. The impact of these methods is tremendous, even though the inability to scale them is one of the greatest hyper-personalized medicine disadvantages.

These drugs cannot cure genetic mutations yet but can relieve the patient's pain. With the improved disease detection and treatment, healthcare practitioners get the toolkit to stop the unbearable symptoms of rare diseases. It can also determine the drug quantity needed to stabilize the condition in the long term.

That's already a huge step forward. The hyper-personalized medicine brings hope to hopeless patients.

It Provides Timely Identification and Accurate Treatment of Diseases

Thanks to DNA screening, hyper-personalized medicine can detect rare and dangerous conditions that need urgent treatment long before revealing themselves with symptoms. Simply put, they not only cure but also prevent the susceptibility of diseases.

What's more, the capabilities of hyper-personalized medicine include prescribing drugs that have bad side effects. The rich data on the patient's genome eliminates the possibility of getting a cure that will bring unexpected symptoms and worsen the patients' condition.

It Can Serve as the Basis for a Healthier Lifestyle

Steadily, hyper-personalized medicine will become more affordable. This way, it can be a tool for numerous people to change their lives in different ways.

For example, each employee can evaluate the stress level in their working environment and provide timely changes in their lives. Another common problem hyper-personalized medicine benefits manage is blood pressure regulation. With wearables, patients can better control their regimen and even set up the needed drug intake.

All in all, the pros of personalized medicine can push the human lifespan even longer than the current 80 years of a fruitful life.

It Incorporates the Key Technological Enhancements

Precision medicine, or patient-centered medication, cannot be effective without Big Data. Thus, the future development of hyper-personalized medicine involves electronic health record adoption, along with Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence algorithms. With information on numerous factors and powerful predictions at hand, the innovation can truly expand healthcare capabilities.

For example, AI algorithms can divide individual patients into subgroups and scale hyper-personalized medical prescriptions efficiently. Another trend is augmented reality in healthcare, meaning providing personal care to patients suffering from pain with relevant games and wound dressings.

Wearables stand out in this line of technological enhancements. They supplement the prescriptions you get from doctors with the real instrument to control them. For instance, wearables can create electrocardiogram reports and send alerts to an ambulance in case of an emergency.

Check more on healthcare information trends in our recent post.

It Possesses Long-Term Value-for-Money

One of the key obstacles to the wide adoption is the cost of hyper-personalized medicine. It's hard to calculate how much money it will take to complete the treatment as each case is individual. Because of that, hyper-personalized medicine in the current stage is not applicable for mass production.

Still, it brings tremendous value for each patient suffering from rare and incurable diseases. And the current activity of medical companies shows that this trend is searching for ways to turn from "hyper-personalization" into "mass personalization" within a couple of years.

Top Examples of Hyper-Personalized Medicine

We all strive to receive custom experiences in shopping malls and supermarkets. But what if we could receive treatment that is personalized? As reality shows, it's already possible.

Check the most impactful hyper-personalized medicine use cases and projects in Softermii's opinion.

Mila Makovec Treatment

The most well-known case is helping Mila Makovec, a 6-year old child with a rare form of Batten disease, with a personalized drug. That was the first case of FDA-approved hyper-personalized medicine treatment ever. And a huge step in hyper-personalized medicine development.

After the drug intake, the girl stopped suffering from acute symptoms. She had seizures and wasn't capable of sitting and standing — even with assistance from a doctor.

Hyper-personalized medicine helped her improve her quality of life, thanks to a drug designed for her situation exactly. Unfortunately, the cure didn't save her life in the long run. But it meant a lot for healthcare development.

This cure was called Milasen after her.

Illumina Project

Illumina works on detecting rare mutations and calculating risk scores for cancer and chronic diseases. The data set for the project includes whole-genome sequencing (WGS), whole-exome sequencing (WES), and genotyping.

Illumina presents the results of its work in handy reports. From them, doctors can receive information on adverse reactions and adjust their therapy prescriptions accordingly.

N-of-1 Medicine

This concept refers to highly individualized medicine that considers various genome parameters in providing treatment. It checks the genome, transcriptome, proteome, and microbiome to create preventive care for the next generation.

With these tools, you get a set of customized recommendations that fit your genetic code perfectly. For example, it can detect the diseases that have a chance to appear in the next few years (or even decades) and provide you with practical recommendations to prevent their development. Alternatively, you can create new habits that will strengthen the health potential of your body.

This way, N-of-1 medicine is not about preventing diseases already but about the true preservation of life.

Materialise Company

Materialise specializes in 3D printing applicable to numerous industries. The healthcare sector applies this technology to predictable surgical planning that can scale hyper-personalized medicine achievements from one patient to millions.

The company works on several drivers for mass personalization. They are predictive planning, cost-effective and scalable operations, next-generation 3D-printed devices, economics based on health regulation, and 3D printing at the point-of-core. As a result, hospitals can get a cost-effective and accurate tool for a customer-centric approach in providing medical services.

Samsung Bot Care

In January 2019, Samsung presented a bot that can take care of daily health routines. The innovation measures several body parameters, including blood pressure, heart rate, and even breathing. What's more, the device can track sleep, analyze its patterns and notify relatives if the person has an emergency.

That's one of the well-known representatives of wearables that take care of healthy lifestyle regimes. Among monitoring alternatives worth mentioning, you can check Apple Watch and Samsung Galaxy Watch Active.

Insilico Medicine

The company applies AI tools for drug discovery. Within a fully-integrated Pharma.ai software, clients can get three types of devices:

PandaOmics. The deep biology analysis engine helps to discover and prioritize new targets.
Chemistry42. Automated Machine Learning platform detects novel lead-like molecules.
InClinico. The instrument predicts and designs clinical trials in terms of success, weak points, and best practices.

All in all, Insilico contributes to the acceleration of drug discovery and drug development, offering AI solutions to pharma and biotechnology companies.

Contact the Softermii team!

Hyper-personalized medicine is an emerging tendency in the healthcare sector to bring tremendous improvements in detecting and dealing with rare diseases. The impact of the methods of hyper personalized medicine goes even further. With wide adoption, each person on the planet will get a set of personalized genome-based recommendations to lead a healthy lifestyle and even increase the lifespan of active years.

That's why hyper-personalized medicine is the trend worth spreading the word about, in our opinion. Even though its replication and expansion are problematic to date, each patient struggling with a rare disorder can already approve that the innovation value is money's worth. And the technology potential is truly outstanding.

If you're interested in the high-tech and effective ways of improving patient care in your hospital or clinic, reach Softermii now! Our company offers software development services of any complexity. In the healthcare sphere, you can get one of these ready-made services:

Healthcare application development
HIPAA video
Near Pharmacy
Telehealth applications
WebRTC
mHealth solutions
IoT firmware
Medical enterprise applications
Health insurance management
Health data security
Compliance
HIPAA
GDPR
HITECH
Blockchain and EHR

Feel free to contact us for a completely customized solution! Our dedicated team is eager to help you build software that will totally fit your business needs and expectations.

Let’s build the future together now!

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Written by:

Slava Vaniukov