Tel Aviv University (TAU) researchers hope it will be possible soon to apply personalized medicine to infectious diseases and provide more effective treatments for patients based on their scientific breakthroughs. Personalized medicine for infectious diseases is a rapidly evolving field that aims to use a patient’s individual genetic, environmental, and clinical factors to tailor the best possible treatment for their infection. This approach has the potential to improve patient outcomes, reduce the risk of side effects, and save lives.
Today, personalized medicine is used for the treatment of a subset of diseases such as cancer, but there is almost no use of personal medicine tools in the field of infectious diseases. The research was led by Prof. Irit Gat-Viks and Prof. Eran Bacharach.
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An infectious disease is a condition in which a microorganism (virus, bacterium, or parasite) manages to penetrate and multiply in the human body, causing direct damage to the body’s cells. The damage to the body may also be indirect, as a result of the reaction of the immune system, for example, the creation of inflammation against the same disease-causing agent (pathogen). Until now, the medical world studied the immune response as a single unit, but a team of researchers at Tel Aviv University discovered a way, using experiments and computational tools, to classify two central components of the immune response that operate as a result of severe infectious disease.
The importance of the discovery is that it provides a doorway to the world of personalized medicine in the field of infectious diseases and the provision of more effective treatments for patients. For example, instead of deciding to give a uniform medicine to all patients, for example, an antibiotic like penicillin, the physician will be able to determine precisely which medicine he should give the patient and at what dosage, according to the classification of the infection based on analysis of the ratio between two key markers found in the patient’s blood.
There are a number of different ways that personalized medicine can be used to treat infectious diseases. One approach is to use genetic testing to identify patients who are at risk of developing a particular infection or who are likely to respond poorly to a particular treatment. For example, patients with certain genetic mutations are more likely to develop tuberculosis, and patients with HIV who carry certain genetic variants are more likely to develop drug resistance.
Another approach to personalized medicine is to use pharmacogenomics to tailor drug therapy to a patient’s individual genetic makeup. This involves testing a patient’s DNA to see how they metabolize different drugs. For example, some patients are poor metabolizers of certain antibiotics, which means that they may not respond well to these drugs. By testing a patient’s DNA, doctors can ensure that they are prescribed the right drugs in the right doses.
Personalized medicine is still in its early stages of development, but it has the potential to revolutionize the way that infectious diseases are treated. As our understanding of the genetic and environmental factors that influence infectious diseases grows, personalized medicine will become increasingly important in improving patient outcomes.
AIDS, Tuberculosis, Sepsis, are some examples of where personalized medicine can be used to treat infectious disease.
Prof. Gat-Viks explained that in the general population, people react differently to infections, and therefore there is a need for medical tools to indicate how each person is expected to react to a certain infectious disease. Until now there have been only very general indicators to characterize these diseases, such as inflammatory markers, fever, urine tests, etc.
“Based on these indicators, analyses of the response to the infection that appeared rather uniform can be divided into different responses according to the new classification,” he said. “In extreme cases, as we saw in the Corona epidemic, a person’s immune response to the virus can result in lethality, and preliminary identification of their response can help us save lives. Our new observations and more precise classification of the inflammatory response has allowed us to identify new indicators and markers in our bloodstream. What all this means is that from simple blood tests, we can learn a lot about the health status of people who became ill and give them more comprehensive treatment according to the development of the infection in their bodies.”
