Precision Diabetes Is Slowly Becoming a Reality

Abstract

The concept of precision medicine is becoming increasingly popular. The use of big data, genomics and other "omics" like metabolomics, proteomics and transcriptomics could make the dream of personalised medicine become a reality in the near future. As far as polygenic forms of diabetes like type 2 and type 1 diabetes are concerned, interesting leads are emerging, but precision diabetes is still in its infancy. However, with regard to monogenic forms of diabetes like maturity-onset diabetes of the young and neonatal diabetes mellitus, rapid strides have been made and precision diabetes has already become part of the clinical tools used at advanced diabetes centres. In patients with some monogenic form of diabetes, if the appropriate gene defects are identified, insulin injections can be stopped and be replaced by oral sulphonylurea drugs. In the coming years, rapid advances can be expected in the field of precision diabetes, thereby making the control of diabetes more effective and hopefully leading to prevention of its complications and improvement of the quality of life of people afflicted with diabetes.

Keywords: Maturity-onset diabetes of the young; Monogenic diabetes; Neonatal diabetes; Personalised diabetes; Personalised medicine; Precision diabetes; Precision medicine.

Fig. 1

Precision diabetes: a futuristic model. Adapted from Schwartz et al. [44].

Fig. 2

Advantages of precision diabetes ­applications.