 Hello and welcome to Top 10 Emerging Technologies, a show from the World Economic Forum that looks at the performance of some of the most promising technologies of the last decade. I'm your host, Greta Keenan, and in this episode we'll be talking about personalised medicine, nutrition and disease prevention, which made it onto our 2012 list. To get us started, let's take a look at this video from one of our events in that same year where surgeon and TV personality Mehmet Oz spells out the problem that personalised medicine aims to solve. This is going to shock you, it will blow your mind, but 20% of the medical advice we give is probably wrong. I actually jotted down some quick numbers I was walking in here. The number of patients who fail first time use of drugs, 40% fail depression drugs, 50% fail arthritis drugs, 70% fail Alzheimer's drugs and cancer drugs. I have a whole list of these things. Almost any element you pick, we have high failure rates. And interestingly, this is a problem, of course, for the treatment of patients as a doctor. I try to give you advice, but I have to give it based on how I think everyone responds. Joining us today to tell us more about personalised medicine, nutrition and disease prevention is Dr Liz O'Day, CEO and founder of the precision medicine company Alaris. Hi Liz. Thank you for having me. So most of us have heard of personalised medicine, but what does this actually mean in practice? Personalised medicine means moving away from a one-size-fits-all approach to prescribe medicine sort of blanketly to everyone to something that is more tailored to the individual and thus more personalised. So swimming around and you and I are something called biomarkers or biological markers that make you, you and me, me. And they also explain why you could be more susceptible to certain diseases and me others and why if you and I were to get diagnosed with the same disease and be treated with the same treatment, you could have one outcome and I could have something different. Personalised medicine uses this biomarker information to tailor treatments to optimise for the best outcome for you and a specific outcome for me. Many people, myself included, use interchangeably the terms precision medicine and personalised medicine. Is there a difference between the two? So precision medicine means making drugs work more efficiently, right? So it's identifying subgroups of patients or patient populations where a specific therapy is most likely to benefit them. Personalised medicine is going one step further where it kind of encompasses precision medicine, but it's really now tailored to an equals one for you, right? And this could be developing stem cell therapies derived from the individual patient donor to even determining the most appropriate dose for a particular patient to optimise for that one individual. So back in 2012, Dr Oz stated that 20% of medical advice was inaccurate, which is a pretty confronting statistic. Would you say that that statistic still holds true today or has personalised medicine really made leaps forward in healthcare in the ways we predicted back in 2012? Right now it's estimated that about 25% of oncology drugs actually benefit the patients that they're being prescribed to. And the thing is, though, is it's not that those drugs that we have are bad. In fact, for the patients that they work for, they are truly life-savings, but we haven't optimised who should get them yet. The good news is that precision medicine is making strides every day, which we're starting to uncover more and more why certain patients benefit and why others do not. So I will say we still haven't maybe reached its full fruition. We are getting there and making more progress across this area. I'm curious what are the wider implications for the healthcare industry and society at large of personalised medicine? Personalised medicine stands to fulfil something that we call the triple aim in healthcare, which is first improving outcomes to improving the patient experience. And in this case it could be sort of limiting unnecessary exposure to toxic side effects that are associated with drug treatments, but also reducing healthcare costs. We spend billions of dollars every year on drugs or treatments that don't work. Personalised medicine stands to sort of correct this. We're not only are we going to improve outcomes, but we can cut costs on drugs and treatments that aren't going to benefit an individual and really optimise for success. So back in 2012 we predicted that personalised medicine, nutrition and disease prevention were the future. To what extent is nutrition being tailored to the individual now specifically when it comes to disease prevention? We can figure out for you like how do you process food and what is sort of the most optimal input needed for you to live your most healthy lifestyle. And so we're starting to see somewhat boutique right now firms sort of develop to optimise health and optimise nutrition. What's going to be great is once we kind of have precision nutrition out there, I think it's going to help educate people a lot more and help them take ownership of their own health so that we can actually shift away from the current status of medicine where it's kind of like wait till something breaks and then let's try to find a magic drug that can fix it. Where hopefully we can start to transition to more preventative medicine. So if we were to look five to ten years ahead, where do you think personalised medicine is going to be in that time frame? In the next five to ten years, this is going to be the medicine that we all receive that is the standard of care because not only do we now have the technology to do this, but like it's what people deserve, right? So we have the technology now where we can identify these biomarkers so that we can optimise treatments, deliver personalised therapies to improve outcomes. And so this is going to be, I think, one of the great uniting things in healthcare where it brings together patients, physicians, payers, insurance groups and pharma to say like we need to use this technology that we have to be able to deliver on the promise of personalised medicine. Truly, in the next five to ten years, we will be able to get the right drug to the right patient at the right time at the right dose and optimise all of these parameters. Just on a final note, what are some of the ethical considerations that need to be taken into account as personalised medicine becomes more widespread in the next five to ten years? So personalised medicine only works when you have participation from patients, right? And what that means is that patients have to or consent to donate their blood or their tissue or their biospecimens, which contain that biological information, those biomarkers, as well as their clinical outcome data. And so what we need to do is create safeguards that encourage people to make this data accessible so innovators like myself and others can develop these precision medicine tools. But we do it in such a way that there's transparency and safeguards built in so that people feel comfortable donating and knowing how their data will be used and protected so that we're not risking people not wanting to participate because they're unsure of what's going to happen with the data, but rather they feel empowered that by participating in this process they are literally creating the future of medicine. And we need all groups, all ethnicities, all geographies, people from all different socioeconomic backgrounds to be involved in this process. Otherwise we risk increasing health disparities and that's not the future of medicine that we want to create. Wonderful. Thank you so much for that very thought-provoking answer and thank you for sharing all of your insights today on personalised medicine, nutrition and disease prevention. Happy to you. Thanks for having me. As we've heard today, personalised medicine, which at its core is getting the right treatment to the right person at the right time, still hasn't reached its full potential nearly a decade on from us listing it as one of the top ten emerging technologies. Nevertheless, there has been progress year on year and we are getting closer to tailoring treatments and nutrition plans to individuals. Something that Dr O'Day predicts will be common practice within the next five to ten years. But if we want to ensure that personalised medicine benefits everyone in society, then the health data upon which doctors base their medical decisions will need to be representative of all ethnicities, geographies and socioeconomic backgrounds, or risk widening rather than narrowing health disparities. If you enjoyed this episode, please join the conversation on social media and we'll see you next time for another episode of top ten emerging technologies.