Review of Eric Topol's call for personalized medicine in his new book, The Creative Destruction of Medicine: How the digital revolution will create better health care.
"It's compelling stuff. Even if they don't cause harm, drugs often don't benefit most of the people who take them. Take Lipitor, a statin advertised as reducing the risk of heart attack by 36 per cent. Pfizer isn't lying with this claim, but closer reading reveals 2 per cent of patients taking Lipitor had heart attacks, compared with 3 per cent taking a placebo - or just 1 in 100 people will avoid a heart attack by taking the drug. Topol slaps you in the face with facts like these and shouts: "wake-up!"
The answer, he says, lies in technologies that tailor medicine to the individual - something that has long been talked about, but which is finally almost within reach. Almost, because although Topol tells some incredible tales of individuals with unexplained diseases having their genomes sequenced to find a cure, they remain in a minority. Individualised medicine for the masses is still a long way off, and although Topol provides a seductive vision of the future, he is vague on just how we get there.
That aside, the book provides an excellent summary of the current state of medical genetics and how fast it is progressing, with examples that may surprise even those working in medicine. As director of the Scripps Translational Science Institute in La Jolla, California, Topol is clearly abreast of the very latest developments, and the book feels extremely current."
"It's compelling stuff. Even if they don't cause harm, drugs often don't benefit most of the people who take them. Take Lipitor, a statin advertised as reducing the risk of heart attack by 36 per cent. Pfizer isn't lying with this claim, but closer reading reveals 2 per cent of patients taking Lipitor had heart attacks, compared with 3 per cent taking a placebo - or just 1 in 100 people will avoid a heart attack by taking the drug. Topol slaps you in the face with facts like these and shouts: "wake-up!"
The answer, he says, lies in technologies that tailor medicine to the individual - something that has long been talked about, but which is finally almost within reach. Almost, because although Topol tells some incredible tales of individuals with unexplained diseases having their genomes sequenced to find a cure, they remain in a minority. Individualised medicine for the masses is still a long way off, and although Topol provides a seductive vision of the future, he is vague on just how we get there.
That aside, the book provides an excellent summary of the current state of medical genetics and how fast it is progressing, with examples that may surprise even those working in medicine. As director of the Scripps Translational Science Institute in La Jolla, California, Topol is clearly abreast of the very latest developments, and the book feels extremely current."
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