'Personalised medicine' to improve drug response; research being carried out, says Nobel laureate

New Delhi: Medicines and drugs should be administered with intensive care and responsibility, ensuring which drug would suit whom and whether it will fulfil what a patient needs.

Unfortunately, there have been numerous incidents wherein severe ill health cases have been given drugs that didn't suit them.

To keep these kind of cases at bay, Kurt Wuthrich, a Nobel laureate revealed information about an ongoing research being carried out with the goal of producing 'personalised medicine' broadly to see that unsuitable drugs are not consumed by patients.

"...From my viewpoint, it would be much more important to identify those who should not be given a particular drug. There are so many drug candidates that have to be thrown out," he told reporters at the CSIR-Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB) here.

Certain drugs, including some very popular, had to be taken out from markets, he said.

Wuthrich was awarded Nobel in chemistry "for his development of nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy for determining the three-dimensional structure of biological macromolecules in solution" in 2002, the CCMB said.

'Personalised medicine' is an active area of research as response of patients would be different to drugs due to genetic differences, CCMB Director Rakesh K Mishra said.

"We have genetic variation in the population. Some individuals have different sequence in which proteins or any drug target is behaving differently. That's why people are now interested in sequencing the genomes and relating to the drug response and then able to tell that this population will respond to the drug and that population will not respond to the drug," he said.

There are psychiatric drugs or cancer drugs that respond only to 50 per cent or 60 per cent population, Mishra said.

"That (differences in drug response) is because genetic differences exist. So, personalised medicine is a very active area of research where after some years you will go with your genome card for your medicine like your identity card," he said.

(With PTI inputs)