There is no doubt that personalized medicine is a major hope for all countries. Progress has been made in research in the U. S. and in Europe. Asia is also beginning to see some advancement. I think that Canada was lagging a bit behind in this area. That is why a major strategy on personalized medicine was launched a few weeks ago and was announced jointly by ministers Aglukkaq and Goodyear.
Personalized medicine could completely change the way diagnoses are made. I hope we will one day be able to use it to treat patients. Currently, a large number of patients being treated with medication are not responding to it. In many cases, that is due to the fact that the patients simply do not have the genetic elements that encode the targets the medication has an effect on. Therefore, medication is usually given to much more people than would be likely to respond to it.
The advantage of personalized medicine is that it will enable us to stratify patients and thereby focus specifically on the people whose genetic makeup predisposes them to respond to that medication. That will help us target treatments much better. As you know, that method is already being used to treat cancer in cases where it must be determined whether certain types of cancer cells will respond to a specific chemotherapy treatment, for instance. If it is known that, in terms of genetics, cells can respond to a chemotherapy treatment, we can subject patients to chemotherapy—which, as you know, is no trivial matter—and ensure they respond to it. On the other hand, that same treatment will not be administered to patients whose cancer cells do not have the required receptors for the medication and who, consequently, would not respond to it at all. So it is really a matter of specifying who is at risk, what the signature of the disease is and how we can ensure that the therapy is actually in line with a given treatment.
Personalized medicine is also very useful in the drug industry. Once randomized treatment trials are carried out, we will be able to ensure that we target specifically those groups of people that can respond to the treatments being tested. We hope that this will enable us to conduct randomized treatment trials on fewer patients and that we will not have to submit patients to treatments they are unlikely to respond to. In the case of neurological diseases, it is often not a matter of specific diseases, but syndromes that, presumably, cover various genetic identities. Therefore, we would be able to administer treatments that are more appropriate for stratified patients we refer to as responders.