The future of medicine is individual.

The term presently coined for this is Personalized or Precision Medicine.

Precision medicine is defined by the simultaneous identification (diagnosis) and targeted elimination (treatment) of metabolic defects causing and driving a particular disease at a decisive stage of its manifestation. It relies on clinically validated biomarkers.

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In future, biomarkers will directly link diagnosis to treatment (beyond all present clinical, pathological, imaging or laboratory procedures):

• in accordance with the precise stage of metabolic disease development at the time of recording, and
• with an accordingly targeted therapy (based on detailed assessment of the relevant abnormalities in both organ structure and function).

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Why so?

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Because this combination of biomarker-based diagnosis and the corresponding marker-based treatment permits:

• an unprecedented increase of effectiveness of any given therapy, while, at the same time, resulting in
• a significant reduction of both number andseverity of undesired side effects of treatment.

Presently, we are still at the dawn of Precision Medicine.

Primary advances made in the field of tumor disease plainly demonstrate the enormous advantages of Precision Medicine.

However, Precision Medicine applies not only to tumor disease currently accounting for 30 percent of all diseases in people over 50 years of age.

It applies as well to the group of Chronic Inflammatory Diseases representing the majority of diseases in aging populations (accounting for up to 70 percent after the age of 50), and there, Precision Medicine is badly needed.

The lungs have a surface are a equivalent to a tennis court. With each breath (and just at rest, we breathe roughly 16 times per minute), this huge surface is pulled wide by muscle force and then contracted again only by the elastic structure of the lung.

The biophysical forces put on this lung structure during breathing are considerable. Therefore, the loss of surface (matrix) integrity in structurally and functionally critical lung compartments, such as the small bronchi (the air-conducting space) and the alveoli (the gas-exchanging space) has tremendous effects, inflammation being just its first result.

Not surprisingly, acute pneumonia(pulmonary inflammation) is the most common cause of death in aging individuals - regardless of what other disorder is simultaneously occurring in the body.

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Chronic pulmonary inflammation is equally disastrous, but much less apparent, as the body’s regenerative repair capacity (shrinking with age) masks its effects on structure and function. As a result, the critical outcome of chronic inflammation are usually difficult to diagnose before the age of 50. This is unfortunate, because the combined pathology of structural disintegration will become progressive at that stage, as the body has no primary repair capacity anymore to withstand. The result is both renewed inflammation and a different repair quality called secondary repair (i.e. scarring = fibrosis).

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While medical and pharmaceutical development has centered on inflammatory processes for many decades, persistent loss of structural integrity combined with a growing inability to sustain regenerative wound healing have only recently gained attention.

Transgenion’s new knowledge concerns the very basis of Precision. Accordingly, our identification process has centered on prospective clinical studies identifying stage-specific biomarkers during the entire course of disease development, e.g. in COPD covering up to 30 years.

Fortunately, this has been possible, as each stage of disease comprises critical periods characterized by clinically well-characterized structural and functional features allowing the correct association with the key biomarkers linking structural failure to inflammation, fibrosis and loss of function.

Not very surprisingly, many of the clinically validated key markers originate from processes controlling and enabling repair.