Promises of the Minister and opinions of experts

Expert: personalized medicine is a 10-15–year perspective

Elena Kalinovskaya, Pharmaceutical Bulletin

A few days ago, the Minister of Health Veronika Skvortsova at a meeting of the Presidential Council for Strategic Development and Priority Projects chaired by Vladimir Putin spoke about the development of new technologies, including regenerative and personalized medicine. Experts are sure that this is a promising direction, but they are still far from being widely used in practice.

The right directions

According to Veronika Skvortsova, rapid genome reading technologies will be introduced in the next three years, which will allow creating a unified system of biomarkers of major diseases by 2020, as well as modern technologies for monitoring human health and a network of high–tech centers for predictive, predictive (so in the text - VM) and preventive medicine.

"Biomarkers are necessary for the implementation of the ideology of preventive medicine, early detection of the disease, monitoring of preventive measures," explains the Director General of the ISHR Artur Isaev, adding that there are already biomarkers for some diseases.

The Minister also said that since 2017, regenerative medicine methods based on cellular and tissue technologies have been introduced. By 2020, a network of biobanks, depositories and collections of biomaterials will be created, which will give a new impetus to the development of regenerative medicine with the transplantation of autologous, that is, organ and tissue substitutes obtained from human own cells.

"In the same period of time, personalized pharmacotherapy will be developed – targeted immune drugs for oncological, systemic autoimmune diseases, vector vaccines, gene therapy and genome editing mechanisms, as well as biophysics methods in the form of robotics, cyber prostheses, various human joints and machine mechanisms," the minister announced plans.

What a trick

"It's very good that the minister started talking about it," Artur Isaev believes. – The methods that Veronika Skvortsova talked about really exist. For example, we have SPRS therapy used in dermatology. In addition, we are developing other technologies, in particular, to help patients with epidermolysis bullosa. But we need some guidelines. As the president said, specifics. How many methods per year will healthcare master, how many products and in which areas. We need to move on to more tangible plans and this is the next step."

Head of the Genetics Laboratory of the Center for Biomedical Technologies of the Federal Scientific and Clinical Center of the FMBA of Russia Alexey Nikitin says that the ministry's plans are still a rather distant future, even for foreign practice. "Such initiatives can technically be introduced into world practice no earlier than in 10-15 years. Of course, developments in the field of personalized medicine are constantly being carried out in the world today, including in the genetic laboratory of our Center, and discoveries in this area are quite promising. However, the implementation of the project will be possible, alas, not tomorrow. Therefore, Veronika Igorevna talks more about the prospect for the future." According to him, in 10-15 years the possibilities of regenerative medicine and personalized pharmacotherapy will become available, but at first the technologies will have a fairly high cost. And only with time these services will become massive.

Portal "Eternal youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru  29.03.2017