By Sajeev Nair, the Founder & Chairman, Vieroots
If you have a loved one suffering from a specific type of cancer and are closely involved in their treatment, you might have encountered a peculiar suggestion from their oncologist. They may offer to run a genetic test, based on which they will choose specific medicines for the treatment. That is a glimpse of precision medicine.
Five or ten years ago, such a treatment protocol was unheard of, at least in India. But today, it is fast becoming the de facto standard. Precision medicine is personalized medicine, fine-tuned for each person depending on whether the patient has specific genetic variants. This has been made possible primarily by advances in AI, which have succeeded in detecting genetic peculiarities in how a person responds to specific cancer medicines.
Another example is from cardiovascular disease management. AI tools developed by the Cambridge Centre for AI in Medicine and other AI solution providers help clinicians customize treatments based on individual profiles. In the realm of mental health, AI-powered chatbots and virtual therapists now provide personalized mental health support by analyzing user interactions and tailoring responses to individual needs.
Another medical domain where AI has found early success is drug discovery and development. AI is used to analyze vast datasets to identify potential drug candidates and predict their effectiveness for specific patient groups. This accelerates the development of personalized medications and reduces the time and cost involved in bringing new drugs to market.
Other applications of AI in medicine include enhanced diagnostics, where AI can detect issues that human eyes may miss; personalized treatment plans that ensure high efficacy with minimal side effects; and improved efficiencies by automating routine administrative tasks, allowing healthcare professionals to focus more on patient care and reducing the risk of human errors. Additionally, AI can integrate diverse and voluminous data—from genetic tests, blood work, scans, health wearables, lifestyle inputs, relevant medical research, and population studies—to generate breakthrough insights that would be humanly impossible to achieve.
There are over 700 health-tech companies that undertake this kind of work in the US alone, not counting the pharma companies doing the AI based drug discoveries. Do you think that this AI based movement in medicine is revolutionary? Then wait till you hear about precision healthcare that is based on predictive analytics, as it is here that AI finds greater application.
But before that, I need to differentiate between the terms ‘medicine’ and ‘healthcare’. By ‘medicine’, we generally refer to the reactive treatments that are resorted to after a positive diagnosis. Therefore, ‘medicine’ is a part of healthcare, and you might think it is a pretty big part. Yes, for sure, ‘medicine’ dominates ‘healthcare’ as we see it today. But this is changing fast.
‘Healthcare’ involves much more than just ‘medicine’, as it is also home to domains like prevention and wellness. By prevention, we mean not just the statutory childhood vaccinations against infectious diseases or pandemic-era masks and social distancing, but any research-validated method that can guard against the development of non-communicable diseases – which have become the main killers, by the way – like diabetes, hypertension, cardiovascular diseases, cancers etc.
And by wellness, I refer to not just a disease-free state, but that perfect state of health where your body and mind are primed for peak efficiency, performance and productivity. This achievement should also come without any toll on your emotional, familial and social life; rather in a perfect state of wellness, you should be able to thrive in all these aspects.
So, coming back to my core thread of thought, healthcare is much larger than medicine, as it also encompasses prevention and wellness. According to studies done by McKinsey, Deloitte and other such global consulting groups, this prevention & wellness sub-sector has already entered a high-growth trajectory that will make it overtake reactive treatments 60:40 by as near as the end of the next decade.
If you are wondering how on earth it is possible, there are two answers to this riddle, one, the simple mathematical answer, and the other, the logical answer. Mathematically speaking this tectonic flipping all set to happen between treatments vs. wellness is a no brainer, as prevention & wellness is growing at around 15% CAGR now, as against reactive treatments growing at only around 7% CAGR.
However, the logical answer is much more interesting. Once upon a time, wellness was looked down upon by modern medicine as it was seen to tout hazy or vague concepts like ‘natural’ or ‘herbal’. But across the past decade, wellness has made a sort of quantum jump into verifiable or research-validated products and solutions. Prevention & wellness could transform itself into such a precise & personalized science, only because it climbed atop the shoulders of two giants – genetics and AI.
Of these, the genetic revolution happened first, as post the completion of the Human Genome Project in 2003, there has been a flood of genetic research into almost all common and rare non-communicable diseases (NCDs), often called as lifestyle diseases as faulty lifestyles were found to trigger them.
These continuous efforts happening at thousands of the world’s best medical universities revealed that NCDs often have genetic roots behind them, apart from the lifestyle factors that trigger these diseases. Genetic research also revealed that there are preventive lifestyles that can guard against the development of these diseases by their epigenetic effect.
Epigenetics refers to a cellular mechanism by which lifestyle factors can override hard-coded genetics without actually making changes at the DNA level. Hence epigenetic grade lifestyle changes are those changes in diet, exercise, sleep, weight management, stress management etc. that are research-validated to keep specific hard-coded disease risks at bay.
I will explain this with an example. Suppose you have entered into your 40s and are starting to get interested in your health as you have heard that it is now that the killer diseases rear their ugly heads first. You have heard all the generic advice – no sugar, no salt, no fries, daily 1 hour runs, 8 hours sleep, zero stress – and wondered how uncool it would be to live like that, preempting for all diseases!
Now, what if there is a test that can detect your genetic chances for developing any among hundreds of lifestyle diseases? And what if such a solution would also suggest you only specific epigenetic-grade lifestyle changes in diet, exercise, sleep, weight management, yoga, meditation, breathwork etc. that can keep your detected disease risks at bay? That would be too easy, but straight from sci-fi, you must be thinking.
Of course it is like sci-fi, and would have remained sci-fi, if not for the advancements in genetic research and the unique data-handling and pattern-recognition abilities of artificial intelligence. Thanks to these twin giants, such a solution is not sci-fi anymore. After enabling such solutions, AI is making further advancements in health-tech, most of them specifically in the field of precision and personalized wellness.