Challenges and Advances in Precision Drug Development for Non-Communicable Diseases

Precision medicine focuses on targeted, personalized care. It uses Big Data to make disease or illness diagnoses, treatment therapies, and prevention more personalized, proactive, predictive, and precise. Precision medicine is “medical care designed to optimize efficiency or therapeutic benefit for particular groups of patients, especially by genetic or molecular profiling.” A somewhat vague outline of how precision medicine treats diseases suggests that physicians select treatments most likely to help patients. Drugs are available to treat infectious diseases. The situation is very different for noncommunicable diseases (NCDs); the essential part of applying precision medicine has frequently been ignored. Precision drugs developed based on omics information must be available for physicians to select meaningful treatments and therapies. However, molecular targets of NCDs needed for precision drug development have not yet been identified. For precision drug development, the necessary causes of NCDs need to be defined at the molecular level. Here, the essential requirements and tools for precision drug design, development, testing, manufacture, and clinical applications were examined. The findings revealed that Precision medicine is progressing; some 25% of all new therapeutics approved since 2015 have a precision or personalized component, according to the Personalized Medicine Coalition. This covers a wide range of modalities, including small molecules, antibodies, cells, and gene therapies, providing treatment alternatives for cancer and rare conditions such as spinal muscular atrophy (SMA), Duchenne muscular, and hemophilia. Such drugs are not yet available for the vast majority of NCDs. The study concluded that while the use of genomics in drug discovery and development generated excitement, the overall clinical efficacy of drugs developed so far has remained unimpressive, primarily due to the heterogenicity of diseases.