Prospects and Challenges of Precision Medicine in Lower- and Middle-Income Countries: A Brief Overview

Abstract

The trend of NCDs in most LMIC countries is slowly but gradually follows that of in the developed countries. There are four significant diseases reported by WHO, which are equally common, such as CVDs, diabetes, cancer, and chronic respiratory disease that causes widespread early death & morbidity. Indeed, it incurs an overwhelming financial burden to most countries in the world. The rise of drug-resistant microbes is another major problem. To overcome this issue, precision medicine (PM) comes into play whereby individual variability in genes, environment, lifestyle, and nutrition of each person is considered for disease treatment & prevention. PM provides a personalized approach, the right treatment to the right people at the right time. Many wealthy countries in the West have started adopting PM though the initial cost is high, ultimately, in the long run, will reduce the healthcare cost by getting rid of the ineffective treatment strategies. However, the PM in LMICs is still at an early stage due to issues such as lack of populationspecific data, competency, expertise, and poor financial support.
 Bangladesh Journal of Medical Science Vol.19(1) 2020 p.32-47

Community pharmacists’ perceived value on precision medicine, desired training components, and exposure during pharmacy education: Malaysia’s experience

“…The study revealed that there is much room for improvement on the levels of knowledge, and is possibly an indicator that precision medicine in low and middle income countries are very much at its infancy ( Haque et al, 2020 ). Similar to the findings of this study, where pharmacists had good perceptions and were willing to pursue precision medicine (albeit in moderation), past research inferred that the idea of precision medicine, as well as pharmacogenomics, had been well received among primary care providers including general practitioners and pharmacists ( Luke et al, 2021 ; Surofchy et al, 2021 ; Gammal et al, 2022 ).…”

Global surgery: Improving health in low-income countries

“…However, with the epidemiological changes in these regions (cancer, traffic accidents, etc. ), unmet surgical burdens have become a major problem of morbidity and mortality 9,11,24 . The region with the gratest unmet surgical burden per 100.000 population is Sub-Saharan Africa 11 .…”

Adoption of Precision Medicine; Limitations and Considerations

“…According to the U.S. National Library of Medicine, "Precision Medicine" is an emerging approach that considers individual differences such as genes, environment, and lifestyle for preventing and treating particular diseases [4], [12]. Furthermore, the institute of US National Cancer defines Precision Medicine as "a form of medicine that uses information about a person's genes, proteins, and environment to prevent, diagnose, and treat disease" [13]. Moreover, the approach of PM is the category of medical sciences that aims to predict the possibility of developing a disease, achieve a precise diagnosis, and optimize the best performance of treatment for a particular patient [14].…”