Researchers from the Hunter Medical Research Institute and the University of Newcastle are working on ways to prevent disease and reduce human suffering through precision medicine.
Professor Rodney Scott says precision medicine is a method of ensuring that patients are given the correct diagnosis and treatments for diseases, as well as identifying the ways that people respond to different therapies.
"It really relies on the fact that you're trying to identify factors that will help you decide whether or not a patient is going to respond appropriately to a particular intervention, or if they're not going to respond- or even worse- if they're going to mount an adverse reaction."
"That's particularly important because you don't want to provide treatments to people that one- either won't work- or two, cause problems."
According to Scott, the research will be a way of understanding the genetic basis of disease.
"If they do get a particular disease, what's their recurrent risk?"
"Especially this is related to cancer- we're particularly interested in trying to understand what are the factors that influence whether or not somebody who's diagnosed with a disease, treated, it disappears, and then a few years later it comes back."
Scott says that this form of research will be a critical technique used in medicine in the future.
"It's going to become quite evident that we're going to have to start identifying groups of people who will respond appropriately to particular therapies, and if they don't, identify alternative therapies that they will respond to, and this is an important move forward."
