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INDUSTRY FOCUS MEDICAL & PHARMACEUTICAL PERSONALISED MEDICINE:
Creating medicine specific to each individual requires a lot of data that
must be made always available and always secure. Greg Hookings, director of business development – EMEA, Stratus Technologies, explains why Edge Computing is a key stepping stone to providing personalised medicine
as precision medicine, it differs from regular medicine approaches by tailoring decisions and medications to an individual person. Traditionally, when a new medicine is
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brought to market it goes through rigorous testing processes with multiple levels of trials ending in a final stage of human trials. Following a successful trial, it is then put into production where it must follow strict validation protocols, ensuring each medicine batch is manufactured in exactly the same way. When drugs are prescribed, it is standard
practise for the patients to report symptoms and a professional to then prescribe a suitable, proven, medicine that is currently on the market. However, those medicines are proven in a trial setting and, while they may report success at treating a certain issue, it can sometimes only apply to that specific situation. For example, only 40% of patients benefit from common asthma and diabetes drugs, and back in 2015 in a pre-COVID world, 6.5% of NHS hospital admissions were from adverse drug reactions – an issue which
ather than taking a one-size-fits-all approach, the future of medicine is personalised. Sometimes referred to
accounted for the use of over 8000 beds at a time when capacity was stretched to breaking point. The drugs involved were, of course, rigorously tested and assessed, but can’t fully account for side-effects in an individual patient. Personalised medicine works in the opposite
way. While the symptoms are reported in the same way, each patient is then reviewed by their level of risk. They are then assessed based on genetic factors, with doctors being able to suggest the best form of treatment from a growing database of information formed of actual results. The traditional method is essentially a trial and error approach, while personalised medicine takes into account the individual needs of each patient based on genetic factors rather than estimations, providing the right treatment, at the right dose, at the right time. Personalised medicine will not only benefit the patient with increased wellbeing and fewer side effects, but also promises to reduce the overall drug budget for the NHS.
ALWAYS ON AVAILABILITY For medicine manufacturers and healthcare professionals, the first step in personalised
54 DESIGN SOLUTIONS JULY/AUGUST 2023
medicine is human genome sequencing. At inception this was an extremely costly process, and even 10 years ago it cost around $10,000 to complete – but today the cost is around $600 and still falling. This is the first critical data set that is imperative to offering personalised medicine and it is being generated at an ever-increasing rate. Meanwhile personal smart devices and digital medical records mean there is an influx of other useful data, but healthcare providers face the huge task of creating expandable big data infrastructure and analytical methods to make the provision of personalised medicine practical. The next critical data set is testing. As mentioned, this testing has to be completed only on those with specific genetic factors, reducing necessary sample sizes and rapidly decreasing the time to deliver treatment. For personalised medicine to work, both critical
data sets must be always available, at both sides of the production line. Both healthcare providers and manufacturers of medicine need the ability to collect, store and process huge amounts of data at the source – all of which can be achieved through Edge Computing. By moving computing power to where it’s needed rather
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