P4 medicine

P4 Medicine is the vision of American biologist Leroy Hood, and is short for "Predictive, Preventive, Personalized, and Participatory Medicine." The premise of P4 Medicine is that, over the next 10-20 years, medicine will be profoundly different. Enabled by changes in technology, it will become predictive, preventive and personalized. While science and technology are not the only drivers, two new science and technology developments that will catalyze this revolution are most important: 1) the application of systems approaches to disease, and 2) the invention of new diagnostic, measurement and analysis technologies. P4 Medicine will manage a person's health, instead of a patient's disease.

Current medical practice is to diagnose serious illness as early as possible, then treat it. P4 Medicine detects disease at the earliest stages, the idea that when you're sick, a diseased organ has its networks perturbed, either by the environment or by disease. These perturbed networks change gene expression, which leads to illness. Because P4 Medicine detects disease at the earliest stages, treatment may begin at the earliest stages. Extensive information on the health condition of each person, presumably genomic and proteomics data may be gathered from a drop of blood. This data is then used to predict both health and disease. Systems biology techniques are used to develop methods to prevent the disease from even occurring. Because each person has a unique biological situation and each person's response to treatment is unique, a unique personalized treatment is required for each person.

Hood began with these three P's. At the Institute for Systems Biology's Fifth International Symposium, Dr. Hood said that a conversation with Sergey Brin and Larry Page persuaded Hood that the new medicine required a 4th P, participatory, to indicate that the patient actively participates in the design of their therapy. This would appear to be by analogy with Participatory Design, a concept mostly applied to software, that actively involves the user in the design process.

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