My understanding is that for clinical trials, they essentially look at the dna “history” of each person with a disease (among other things), looking for common traits or mutations. How does this information then relate to what drugs they’re going to start testing?
If I find a common trait, do you want common symptoms to start treating them?
Apologize if my understanding is completely butchering reality
In: Biology
I’ll give a simple example. They might have a drug that works well in 30% of patients. Why? Why not in all patients? Genetic testing might reveal the answer. Maybe those 30% have a genetic trait that makes them particularly susceptible to the drug effectiveness. That’s good to know and might make the difference between a successful trial and a failed trial. Now they know the drug works, but only on certain patients that must first be pre-screened for that trait.
Maybe they have a difference in a receptor. Or maybe their liver clears the drug differently. Or maybe their body ‘sees’ the drug better at the sight of action.
first it would look to to see if there are common traits among sufferers; if we know 85% of people with AAAA have genetic code like 135WGC45 we could develop better tests for earlier diagnosis and treatment.
second, we now have medicine (therapy) that works directly to counter faulty genetic code….gene therapy.
one recent and very successful therapy is for the disease: cystic fibrosis; about 50% of all people with cyctic fibrosis have the same genetic “flaw” in their genes. so we know which CF patients can be prescribed this new medicine and that gene therapy is very specific to a mutation causing the disease and not the disease itself
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