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Healthcare is all about personalised medicine: Princess Haya

Dubai - With unique genetic make-up presenting challenges, it is time to give personalised treatment, says Princess Haya bint Hussein.

This year, healthcare is all about personalised medicine, said Princess Haya bint Hussein, wife of His Highness Shaikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Vice-President and Prime Minister of the UAE and Ruler of Dubai, at the Leaders Conference held as part of Arab Health 2016.
Princess Haya on Thursday officially launched the College of Medicine and its degree programme for medical undergraduates at the Mohammed Bin Rashid University of Medicine and Health Sciences, when visiting the Dubai Healthcare City pavilion.
Addressing a room full of industry leaders on Thursday, she said: "In the UAE, improving our nation's healthcare is one of our top priorities. However, our rapidly growing population, with unique genetic make-up, changing demographics, and lifestyle habits, continue to present us with challenges."
"We are still bombarded with new cases of diabetes, heart disease, and cancer that make us wonder that perhaps we need to do more than just have universal healthcare provision, with one size fits all? Perhaps it is time to get personal?," she said.
She also said that personalised medicine meant tailoring treatment to individual patients based on their genetic code. "It is a move away from a 'one size fits all' approach to treatment and care to one which uses emergent approaches in diagnostic tests, functional genomics, molecular pathway, and real-time data analysis to tailor make the treatment to fit the individual patient needs - more of special size for one person."
Princess Haya also said that emerging evidence over the past two decades shows that the traditional practice of one-size-fits-all often misses its mark.
"Every day, millions of people around the world are taking medications that are not useful to them. At best, the top 10 highest grossing drugs in the USA help less than 50 per cent of those taking them," she said. "Is it right to subject patients to side effects from drugs that are of no benefit to them? Is this ethical or justifiable? At a time of scarce healthcare resources, is it sensible to be spending money on medications that simply don't work for the majority of those who take them?" she questioned.
Quoting figures from the International Diabetes Federation, she said the disease costs Dh7,000 per person in the UAE. At approximately 800,000 cases tabulated for 2014, the seemingly negligible per person figure becomes dangerously alarming at a total of Dh5.6 billion.
"Imagine what we could do with this money if we did not have to spend it catering to a disease that could be curbed through the synergies of modern medicine, diagnostics and pharmacology."
asmaalizain@khaleejtimes.com