5P medicine

5P medicine is a concept developed to address the limitations of traditional Western medicine with the insights provided by omics research. Instead of reacting to illness or injury, 5P medicine makes use of five components – preventive, predictive, precision, population-based, and participatory medicine. 5P medicine shifts the focus towards a more proactive and patient-centric practice. This approach relies on high-content molecular technologies that enable a more precise analysis of a person’s biology than ever before.

5P medicine is poised to transform medicine specifically in the battle against complex chronic disease where genetics is not enough to determine disease onset or outcome. For example, genomics can inform on the risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease, but it cannot track how this risk evolves throughout our life. Similarly, genomics can identify genotypes that will influence response to a specific drug, but it does not respond to influences from the environment that determine our drug response. Metabolomics does. 

A game changer for complex chronic disease

The scientific community has been at work on chronic disease for over 40 years, yet we are still seeing a surge in conditions such as type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and complex diseases with a strong link to metabolism like Alzheimer’s disease, cancers and autoimmune diseases. Genomics is gaining traction and is increasingly used in the clinics, but genetics only explains about 10-20% of the variance observed in the population for these complex diseases.

The remaining 80-90% of variance link out to our environment, our lifestyle, our exposures. To measure the impact of these factors, other omics must be leveraged, with metabolomics at the forefront of these lifestyle-responsive omics. As a normal reaction to warrant health, our metabolism adapts to changes in the environment to maintain homeostasis and orchestrate molecular responses. In situations where strain is applied to this system, both short-term or long-term, the metabolic picture changes. This is why metabolomics is such a powerful tool to detect early signs of disease in preventive medicine and subtle differences in disease phenotypes relevant to predictive and precision medicine that can be leveraged directly or in combination with genomics in mGWAS studies.

Drive 5P medicine with metabolomics

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