The opportunity exists to prevent degenerative diseases by predicting with biomarkers who will become deaf or blind or suffer from Parkinson’s disease etc. and subsequently to personalize the treatment to match the disease pattern of the individual patient and avoid side effects by recognizing metabolic anomalies in the individual. Verne Mendel systematically uses this strategy in developing treatments for patients having mitochondrial diseases. That is a paradigm shift from medical care in the twentieth century where we encountered these diseases more frequently as the population aged and we only had symptomatic treatments which were usually available only in a one variety fits all users mode.

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Molecular markers provide a key signature of disease type and the anticipated outcome of a particular treatment and anticipate the occurrence of disease complications in individual patients. By correlating the status of a marker with treatment drug dosage for individual patients can be optimized. Likewise it can be practicable to monitor side effects by evaluating relevant particular risk markers and also markers relating to drug metabolism.

Treating a disease in a subgroup of patients all of whom respond versus only thirty or fifty percent of them will save time, cost and effort. It would also enable drug development to become significantly more cost efficient and meet the needs of subpopulations of patients whose disease may be prohibitively expensive and financially difficult to service previously.