Precision Medicine is the current major trend in chronic medical conditions to maximize the chance of saving lives and improving quality of life. This means that days of “one drug fits all” are over, instead, human diversity responses must be considered. Different patients need different drugs, and this is the driver of new medical management.
Chronic inflammation is the “poor sister” of the large family of human diseases. Infectious diseases, cancer, and many other diseases have been managed under precision medicine protocols for decades. Nowadays, antibiograms are mandatory to prescribe antibiotics, and nobody thinks of cancer treatment without biomarkers and targeted therapies. On the contrary, chronic inflammation remains treated with immunosuppressant drugs, which are mostly used following clinical guidelines, drug blood levels, and trial/error approaches.
Inflammatory diseases are clearly lacking a tool to determine the potency (efficacy) of immunosuppressant drugs over the immune cells of the patients. An assay to identify those immunosuppressants that may be more efficacious for each patient at a certain point of time was needed.
