Steps to Improve Precision Medicine in Epilepsy.

Abstract

Precision medicine isan old concept, but it is not widely applied across human health conditions asyet. Numerous attempts have been made to apply precision medicine in epilepsy, this has beenbased on abetter understanding of aetiological mechanisms and deconstructing disease into multiple biological subsets. The scope of precision medicine is to provide effective strategies for treating individual patients with specific agent(s) that are likely to work best based on the causal biological make-up. We provide an overview of the main applications of precision medicine in epilepsy, including thecurrent limitations and pitfalls, and propose potential strategies for implementation and toachieve a higher rate of success in patient care. Such strategies include establishing adefinition of precision medicine and its outcomes; learning from past experiences, from failures and from other fields (e.g. oncology); using appropriate precision medicine strategies (e.g. drug repurposing versus traditional drug discovery process); and using adequate methods to assess efficacy (e.g. randomised controlled trials versus alternative trial designs). Although theprogress of diagnostic techniques now allows comprehensive characterisation of each individual epilepsy condition from a molecular, biological, structural and clinical perspective, there remain challenges in the integration of individual data in clinical practice to achieve effective applications of precision medicine in this domain.