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comment by OftenBen
OftenBen  ·  2206 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Personalized Medicine: time for one-person trials

Doctors 'trial' all kinds of stuff already. In chronic disease clinics it's not uncommon to rotate someone through meds as quickly as they can clear the last one from their system.

With the example of Remicade specifically, it's very rarely the first choice drug for ANYTHING. When it is used, it's used with the understanding that all sorts of bad shit can happen and that it might be discontinued after only a single infusion.

I don't think that there will be a real change in this problem until we get to EMR 2.0 like I daydreamed about a while ago, where your (In theory deidentified) data is automatically available for research purposes. People are just too granular and unique for anything less. To deal with that granularity our solutions must be similarly granular.





user-inactivated  ·  2205 days ago  ·  link  ·  

    I don't think that there will be a real change in this problem until we get to EMR 2.0 like I daydreamed about a while ago, where your (In theory deidentified) data is automatically available for research purposes. People are just too granular and unique for anything less. To deal with that granularity our solutions must be similarly granular.

Not going to happen until homomorphic encryption is practical.

goobster  ·  2205 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Actually, it looks like blockchain technology could make it happen much sooner.

BlockchainForScience is a good resource on the topic. I'm collaborating with people there on how people's healthcare data could be stored in a blockchain, allowing them to release any of their data to anyone, with varying amounts of anonymization.

I still don't fully understand it at a practical implementation level, but from a higher level the logic makes sense.