How Machine Learning Is Shaping The Future Of Precision Medicine

The precision medicine market has come to be viewed with a renewed perspective as more and more partnerships make their way into this space. Recently as a matter of fact, in a partnership between Medidata’s Rave Omics and Castleman Disease Collaborative Network, new patient subgroups and biomarks were revealed that can potentially accelerate diagnosis and treatment of Castleman Disease.

Siltuximab, the only FDA approved drug in the U.S. that is used for the treatment of Idiopathic Multicentric Castleman Disease (iMCD), has an efficacy rate of approximately 34% of patients who participated in a randomized trial. Medidata, in collaboration with CDCN, discovered 6 new subsets of patients who reflected either proteomic disease states or distinct subtypes for iMCD and these newly discovered subsets had a response rate of 65% to siltuximab which is almost double the previous response rate and one major step towards providing personalized medicine for the treatment of Castleman Disease.

Considering that this is only one of the numerous instances of how precision medicine is disrupting the healthcare industry, it is rather discernible that the global precision medicine market is set to witness expansive growth rate over 2018 to 2024.

Advancement in bioinformatics and gene sequencing has added a major impetus to the development of the precision medicine market. Indeed, such advancements are bringing forward new ways to treat diseases and disorders that had no solution in the past. Increasing incidences of genetic disorders such as sickle cell anaemia, thalassemia, hemophilia among many others across the globe are also another reason for the healthcare industry players to be focusing their efforts in expanding the precision medicine market, as personalized medicine has emerged as the new age solution to mitigate such disorders rather than a one size fits all approach.

Oncology to emerge as a profitable growth avenue for precision medicine industry

Incidentally, cancer treatments have accounted for a significant portion of the precision medicine market revenue in recent times and the oncology segment of the precision medicine industry is expected to register an impressive 11.1% CAGR over 2018-2024. One instance that confirms the prediction is the recent approval by the U.S. Food and Drug

Administration of a precision drug that can address a wide range of cancers based on a shared mutation. The new medicine called Vitrakvi or larotrectinib was approved simultaneously for adults as well as for children though oncology drugs are considered much later for children and are meant for patients in whom surgery is likely to cause severe complications and have no satisfactory alternatives. Such instances of success in bringing new drugs to the market that are more specifically designed to succeed in their function are adding new growth avenues for precision medicine market contenders.

Increasing investments in genomics to augment precision medicine industry

The advent of machine learning and artificial intelligence in the field of healthcare has helped in the growth of precision medicine market in a big way as machine learning is an apt method of mitigating the losses faced in the clinical trial phase in which 90% of the drugs fail.

Recently the Oxford based pharmaceutical company, Genomics, collected €9 million in a series B round of funding as it will be using genomics technology for personalized medicine. Leading U.S. pharmaceuticals and life sciences investors such as F-Prime Capital, Foresite Capital and Vertex Pharmaceuticals have participated in the fund-raising round. Genomics utilizes algorithms for genetic data mining and predicting therapeutic intervention outcomes.

With a 100 billion data points that link genetic variations in nearly 14 million human genome positions, genomics arguably has one of the largest databases of its kind and a major contributor to the future of precision medicine industry.

Private investment foundations are also taking an active interest in the growth of the precision medicine market. For instance, recently Blavatnik Family Foundation has gifted a $200 million grant to the Harvard Medical School to help in the acceleration of precision medicine research as well as for the advancement of artificial intelligence and increasing scientific collaboration. The endowment is meant to facilitate precision medicine initiative that was previously hindered by insufficient therapeutic discovery funding, inadequate access to new technologies, obstacles to therapeutic optimization and cultural divide between academic and industry scientists. With the grant, the Harvard Medical School can now focus on single-cell sequencing research that can provide information about the smallest cellular shifts which result in influencing health and disease.

Conclusion

The robust instances of increased investments in the precision medicine industry is not a rarity, making it one of the fastest growing markets in the coming years. The vast expanse of this industry is rather evident from the fact that the precision medicine market size has been forecast to exceed a mammoth USD 96.6 billion by 2024.