Personalized medicine for brain disorders. New hope, old problems

Essay from the year 2016 in the subject Medicine - Medical Frontiers and Special Areas, grade: A, The Chinese University of Hong Kong (School of Biomedical Sciences), course: Molecular Medicine, language: English, abstract: Cutting-edge fields like personalized genomics are one of the potential game-changing solutions for boosting the neurological and psychiatric treatment. Still, its usage has its own limitations. This text considers both, possibilities and complications of this approach.

It is often said that the 21st century is the century of neuroscience. With several moon-shot projects targeting the whole connectome of the human brain, computer modelling of neural networks and mapping of brain functions using neuroimaging it might well be the case. However, the situation in clinics remains a catastrophe. There is no effective treatment for most neurodegenerative and psychiatric diseases. And the development of new drugs is not progressing fast enough. With an increasing social and economic burden of neurological diseases, we face a sad disproportion in funds and resources provided by private pharmacological companies and government projects targeting the brain diseases in comparison to cancer, vascular diseases and viral infections. Those drugs that are currently prescribed were developed in mid-20th century with all the derivatives to be basically the same.