Practice to become personalized

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Practice to become personalized

TAIPEI, Taiwan -- In the future, doctors will offer increasingly personalized

care to pinpoint their patients’ genetic makeup by simply searching a database.

Patients will be able to know what diseases they are prone to, and be able to

prevent them rather than having to go through lengthy treatments. This future is

nearer than many might think. According to Chung-Chen Liu, vice president of the

Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI) and general director of ITRI’s

biomedical engineering research laboratory, “eventually the practice of medicine

will become personalized.”

“You will know your predisposition to a certain disease,” remarked Liu. While

this requires a lot of research and medical devices, it represents a very good

opportunity, he added. To this end, ITRI has made great strides in this effort

and collaborated with international organizations and companies in areas such as

the United States, Japan, China, and Europe.

And while Taiwan invests a relatively small amount towards research compared in

monetary terms with other countries like the United States, this figure is still

reasonably large proportionally, he observes. “Taiwan is very strong in

technology but it is still rather weak in biology,” Liu points out. “So we can

make the machine but how to use the machine is still a problem!” he says with a

chuckle. Instead, he emphasizes the need for a “multidisciplinary approach” to

research.

Liu made the remarks during the 2008 Symposium on Chronic Hepatitis and Liver

Diseases, the premier platform in Taiwan for information on advancements in

research and therapy of liver diseases, yesterday in Taipei City. “Our mission

is to develop the biotech business in Taiwan,” he notes. “Biomedicine is a

global business. You need to be able to go out of Taiwan to make your market

bigger. What we are doing is developing solutions that are unique enough to

stand out.”

One of ITRI’s unique solutions in this area is the screening of herbal

compounds. “We were successful in screening these kinds of compounds against

hepatitis B and hepatitis C,” says Liu. “One of the compounds we have is related

to interferon, which boosts the body’s immune activity.” Three technologies

developed by ITRI related to herbal compound screening have already been

licensed to local companies, which will move forward with clinical trials on

humans. “Herbal products are more affordable and at the same time provide more

unique opportunities and differentiation for us,” observes Liu.

In Taiwan there are unfortunately a lot of patients that suffer from these liver

diseases and this has contributed for Taiwan to become well-known for its

research in this area, says Liu. “Due to a very successful vaccine program (for

hepatitis implemented over 20 years ago, for people younger than 20 years of

age, hopefully hepatitis B will not be a major problem,” said Liu. However, for

people over 20 years of age this disease is still a problem, he adds.

In the case of hepatitis B, before the vaccination program one in five people in

Taiwan were considered carriers; of these, one percent to two percent developed

cancer, Liu says.

While hepatitis B is caused by a DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) virus and

preventable by vaccination, there is currently no cure for hepatitic C, which is

caused by an RNA (ribonucleic acid) virus and spread by blood-to-blood contact.

In the past, most of the treatments were targeted against the hepatitis C virus,

but unfortunately this virus is an RNA virus, which means that it has a higher

mutation rate than the DNA virus, and therefore also has a higher resistance,

Liu explains. The virus eventually through genetic change becomes resistant to

the drugs, he continues.

As there is no cure for hepatitis C, the government’s efforts focus on

information dissemination to make people aware of the disease, he says.

A combination therapy that directly kills the virus and interferon inhibition

(which does not kill the virus directly but boosts the body’s immune response so

that the body’s immune mechanism inhibits virus replication) is essentially

making some headway into managing the disease, notes Liu.