Personalized Medicine
Introduction to Biology

This paper focuses on the representation of the personalized medicine and how the modern techno-scientific has lead for its evolution. Personalized medicine refers to contemporary techno-scientific advantages in modern medicine, such as vitro fertilization technologies, organ transplantation, stem cell therapy, complex life support technologies, etc. The point here is that these and related developments not only continue to stretch and design life, and to boost life expectancy statistics, especially in advanced countries, but they also pose ethical challenges, disadvantages and support a dichotomous relationship between longevity and quality of life.
For example, with hundreds of thousands of test tube babies living in the world, in vitro fertilization (IVF) has become much more common. IVF is usually reserved for instances in which a woman suffers from blocked or damaged fallopian tubes or a man has low sperm count.
The typical IVF cycle begins with drug treatment designed to control ovulation. One common method is to take five days of nasally administered gonadotropin-releasing hormone analogue (GnRH) to shut down the ovaries, followed by then days of injections of follicle-stimulation hormone (FSH) designed to spur the production of multiple eggs.
Blood tests and ultrasound exams help determine the best time to remove the eggs from follicles in the ovaries, which is done surgically bout 36 hours after an injection of human chorionic gonadotropin (hCG). The eggs are then mixed with sperm from the patient’s partner has been donated that same day, and the mixture is incubated in a glass dish for 2-5 days as the fertilized eggs develop. Then selected eggs are placed in the patient’s uterus by means of a catheter inserted through the vagina and cervix, and the patient remains in bed for the next several hours.

Vitro fertilization technology is a great model of modern medicine; however, there are many risks behind this technology. For example, the risks of premature birth and perinatal death are increased after in vitro fertilization. These risks are mainly due to the high incidence of multiple births, which relates to the number of embryos transferred. Women less than 36 years of age who had at least two good-quality embryos were randomly assigned either to undergo transfer of a single fresh embryo and, if there was no live birth, subsequent transfer of a single frozen-and-thawed embryo, or to undergo a single transfer of two fresh embryos. Equivalence was defined as a difference of no more than 10 percentage points in the rates of pregnancy resulting in at least one live birth.
Another good example of modern technology is the kidney organ transplantation. A kidney transplant is an operation that places a healthy kidney in your body. The transplanted kidney takes over the work of the two kidneys that failed, and you no longer need dialysis. This can happen because of illness. People who are in need of an organ transplant often have to wait a long time for one. Doctors must match donors to recipients to reduce the risk of transplant rejection. During a transplant, the surgeon places the new kidney in your lower abdomen and connects the artery and vein of the new kidney to your artery and vein. Often, the new kidney will start making urine as soon as your blood starts flowing through it. But sometimes it takes a few weeks to start working. Many transplanted kidneys come from donors who have died. Some come from a living family member.
A downside of a kidney transplant can be that the wait for a new kidney can be long. In addition, people who have transplants must take drugs to keep their body from rejecting the new kidney for the rest of their lives and some of these drugs can have many side effects which can affect your health.
In conclusion, personalized medicine takes into account the needs of individual patients, and provides custom-tailored therapeutic approaches. More recently, modifying life style approaches as part of a broad preventive medicine orientation, are gaining popularity and yielding positive results. Despite all the impressive advances in imaging technology, advent of new medical diagnostics, and burgeoning of therapeutic interventions, the widespread prevalence of disability and premature mortality associated with chronic conditions such as diabetes, cancer and heart disease continues to frustrate scientists and clinicians alike. There are also many unanswered questions. Why two patients with exactly the same diagnosis and identical test results respond differently to the same treatment? Have we reached a glass ceiling? Are we limited in our scientific understanding of disease and health? Rapid advances of in genotyping and genomics might shed some light.

References

Elective Single-Embryo Transfer versus Double-Embryo Transfer in in Vitro Fertilization. (2004, December 2). Retrieved August 2, 2012, from The New England Journal of Medicine : http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa041032
General Article: In Vitro Fertilization Today. (2010). Retrieved August 12, 2012, from WGBH Educational Foundation: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/general- article/babies-today/
Oguamanan, C. (2009). Personalized Medicine and Complementary and Alternative Medicine: In Search of Common Grounds. Journal of Alternative & Complementary Medicine , 943-949.
Personalize Medicine: A Patient - Centered Paradigm. (n.d.). Journal of Translational Medicine , 206-208.