NUS team taps digital medicine to make treatments more precise

Drugs not only work differently on different people, but they could also have different effects on the same person at different times of their lives.

- Salma Khalik

Professor Dean Ho heads biomedical engineering at the National University of Singapore and is director of the Institute for Digital Medicine at the Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine. He and his team are developing ways to take the guesswork out of medication, and to optimise drug doses and combinations for each person.

For instance, said Prof Ho, it is common for doctors to give cancer patients a two-drug combination as the standard dose. Though adequate, the treatment would be even more effective if there was a way to "modulate the dose a little bit to study the interplay of the two within the patient".

In a clinical trial that he is conducting on his algorithm, called Optim.AI, a small piece of a tumour is used to find the best dose for a particular patient. It is tested against up to a dozen drugs, providing about 900 different combinations to find which works best.

His team then recommends the dose to the doctor, who will decide what to give the patient.