The Future: Towards Personalized Medicine

Abstract

In the case of psychiatric disorders, repeated failures in converting scientific discoveries into newer and better drugs have precipitated a crisis and eroded confidence in the pharmaceutical industry. This final chapter describes how future innovations driven by application of biomarkers can encourage the pharmaceutical companies to look beyond the delivery of all-serving blockbuster drugs to more individualized approaches. This will also have influence on the field of psychiatry and result in the delivery of sensitive and specific biochemical tests to complement and increase the power of the traditional questionnaires for improved diagnosis. Furthermore, the application of emerging biosensor tools will facilitate point of care testing by the fusion of biochemical and clinical information. In this way, patient data will be composed of their past medical histories, bio-patterns and prognoses information, resulting in personalized profiles or molecular fingerprints for each individual with these conditions. On the near horizon, the application of mobile communications technology and grid computing will assist disease prediction, diagnosis, prognosis and compliance monitoring. It is expected that such personalized medicine approaches will help to move psychiatric medicine into the twenty-first century and help us to manage these diseases better than we ever have before.