On this occasion, we will discuss the importance of precision medicine in pediatric oncology.
As a result of medical advances to offer better patient care, precision medicine has emerged to achieve a personalization of diagnosis and treatment that allows for combating the molecular code of the tumor.
Regarding childhood cancer, this type of medicine will be essential since it aspires to reduce unnecessary treatments and prescription errors derived from medications that are not only not useful for the patient but can also be harmful.
After knowing, even superficially, what precision medicine is, the differences with traditional medicine become evident, since in the latter, the same treatment is administered to all patients, regardless of the disease that manifests itself, in each different way. Some may benefit from the treatment, but in others, it may not produce results or cause adverse effects.
Precision medicine avoids this problem since the correct treatment is provided to the patient at the proper time by using precise information about genes, proteins, and other characteristics of the patient’s pathology to determine the diagnosis or treatment of the illness.
Some countries, such as Australia, already develop precision medicine programs to treat childhood cancer. “Zero” is a project that aims to benefit children suffering from misdiagnosed cancers by identifying new treatments targeted explicitly at each case.
This program takes an average of nine weeks to obtain a complete patient analysis and then provide a more specialized and precise therapeutic approach. Its accuracy makes it one of the most sophisticated programs for personalized pediatric medicine.
As data, each year, around 400,000 children and adolescents from 0 to 19 years of age are diagnosed with some cancer, which makes the condition one of the leading causes of mortality in this level population. Childhood cancer is characterized by its embryonic origin and develops in the first two decades of life.
For all these reasons, there is no doubt that precision medicine is a gigantic step taken by science to solve one of the main ills that afflict humanity.
