Dubai: The future for treating diseases with drug therapy is going to become highly personalised, where one drug will not be the answer to common diseases such as hypertension, heart disease, dementia, cancer and diabetes.
Speaking at the third Drug Discovery and Therapy conference held at Dubai Women’s College on Monday, Nobel laureate and pharmacologist Prof. Farid Murad said because these diseases have multiple causes and symptoms and patients are heterogeneous, “we can no longer think about using a single compound to treat all these patients in a single category”.
“There’s going to be the day when a patient walks in the doctor’s office and gets a swab of mucosa taken from the mouth or blood sample and it goes into a machine and he will be able to predict what drug that patient with hypertension, diabetes or heart failure should be treated with,” Murad told fellow scientists at the conference.
This means that there will no longer be multi-billion dollar products on the market decades from now but small markets with tailored therapies for patients with specific diagnoses. By using bio-markers and genetic tests, doctors will be able to determine exactly which drugs will be most effective for a specific disease.
Focus on diabetes
Shaikh Nahyan Bin Mubarak Al Nahyan, Minister of Higher Education and Scientific Research and Chancellor of the Higher Colleges of Technology, also announced yesterday the establishment of the Centre of Excellence for Applied Research and Training (CERT) Diabetes Academy. The academy will help transform the UAE and regional approach to the disease which is a major health concern.
The academy will focus on: ways to identify risk factors and those at risk; on assessing our current level of understanding about diabetes; on reviewing current treatment strategies; strategies to accelerate the development and availability of new medicines for diabetes.
Exams: Test for newcomers
The Ministry of Health plans to test every current and new medical and health professional in the UAE according to their medical specialisation to ensure the quality of professionals in the UAE. At the Drug Discovery and Therapy conference yesterday, the Ministry of Health and the Higher Colleges of Technology’s Centre of Excellence for Applied Research and Training signed an agreement under which the centre will be the exclusive partner to administer these exams.
