Implementing Personalized Medicine in COVID-19 in Andalusia: An Opportunity to Transform the Healthcare System

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic represents an unprecedented opportunity to exploit the advantages of personalized medicine for the prevention, diagnosis, treatment, surveillance and management of a new challenge in public health. COVID-19 infection is highly variable, ranging from asymptomatic infections to severe, life-threatening manifestations. Personalized medicine can play a key role in elucidating individual susceptibility to the infection as well as inter-individual variability in clinical course, prognosis and response to treatment. Integrating personalized medicine into clinical practice can also transform health care by enabling the design of preventive and therapeutic strategies tailored to individual profiles, improving the detection of outbreaks or defining transmission patterns at an increasingly local level. SARS-CoV2 genome sequencing, together with the assessment of specific patient genetic variants, will support clinical decision-makers and ultimately better ways to fight this disease. Additionally, it would facilitate a better stratification and selection of patients for clinical trials, thus increasing the likelihood of obtaining positive results. Lastly, defining a national strategy to implement in clinical practice all available tools of personalized medicine in COVID-19 could be challenging but linked to a positive transformation of the health care system. In this review, we provide an update of the achievements, promises, and challenges of personalized medicine in the fight against COVID-19 from susceptibility to natural history and response to therapy, as well as from surveillance to control measures and vaccination. We also discuss strategies to facilitate the adoption of this new paradigm for medical and public health measures during and after the pandemic in health care systems.

COVID-19 Follow-App. Mobile App-Based Monitoring of COVID-19 Patients after Hospital Discharge: A Single-Center, Open-Label, Randomized Clinical Trial

“…However, COVID-19 is transforming the telemedicine landscape with enormous speed. Hundreds of platforms, mobile applications, and different telehealth technologies have been developed in few months to support COVID-19 diagnosis, treatment, and home follow-up, and also for monitoring other chronic pathologies [16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23].…”

In vitro high-content tissue models to address precision medicine challenges

“…In this context, COVID-19 has proven the importance of personalized medicine, where heterogeneity in treatment response is a great challenge that could possibly cause disease enhancement or efficacy variability in various individuals groups ( Visvikis-Siest et al, 2020 ), for instance elderly individuals that are more susceptible to infection and death ( Guilger-Casagrande et al, 2021 ; Pereira et al, 2021 ). Therefore, personalized medicine for COVID-19 would transform healthcare and clinical practice providing a better preparation and technological platform for future unexpected pandemics ( Dopazo et al, 2021 ).…”

“…Because of the extensive diversified outcomes of COVID-19, personalized medicine could play a key role in the quest for eliminating or reducing challenges with the COVID-19 pandemic, but also provide a deeper understanding of individual responses to SARS-CoV-2 infections and potential therapeutics and vaccines ( Dopazo et al, 2021 ). There have been several reports on the huge variations in responses both to the COVID-19 ( Choi et al, 2021 ; Farajallah et al, 2021 ) and to vaccines for prevention of the disease ( Abo-Helo et al, 2021 ; Barros-Martins et al, 2021 ; Rubin, 2021 ).…”

SARS-CoV-2 infection in multiple sclerosis patients: interaction with treatments, adjuvant therapies, and vaccines against COVID-19

“…Although this could be due to the fact that pwMS that do not receive treatment are elderly or are in terminal stages of the disease [ 93 ]. Therefore, there is a growing need for personalized medicine, which could play a key role in elucidating individual susceptibility to infection, as well as interindividual variability in the clinical course of the disease, prognosis, and response to treatment [ 94 ].…”