Goderich-based professor believes ‘personalized medicine’ is the future of healthcare

A researcher is calling for the use of ‘personalized care’ to better to guide decisions in disease prevention, diagnosis and treatment. Scott Miller explains.

Chapin Korosec has been busy trying to figure out if using an individual’s genetic profile can improve decisions for the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of disease. It’s called “personalized medicine,” and he believes it is within reach for Canadians.

“I think individualized care; high quality individualized care would be the gold standard of a really strong health care system. I think it would be a fantastic outcome. And it’s possible for us to get there,” said the Goderich based professor, and researcher.

Korosec, a well-known expert in infectious disease modelling, and University of Guelph Professor was part of a York University led research team that used machine learning to understand how vaccines mount an immune response through time, looking at differences between people who have HIV and received vaccines, and those that don’t have HIV.

48 weeks of analyzed blood, saliva, and white blood cell samples, helped provide the data to show the potential benefits of personalized vaccination regimes, instead of mass vaccinations, that impact people differently.

“In normal life, when we have COVID and the flu and RSV and maybe measles floating around society, we have an individualized care opportunity so that we can all be optimally vaccinated, and go into our clinics and have an optimal continuity of care sort of algorithm that governs our individualized health care,” said Korosec.

Privacy, and cost, are the main stumbling blocks to incorporating this kind of “personalized” care, into Canada’s public health system, believes Korosec.

“The algorithms in principle that you would use, they’ve already been developed. And so, it’s building these relationships, building partnerships, convincing leaders in health care that this is a meaningful step forward towards an individualized care system,” said Korosec.

“And, doing it in a way that protects people’s privacy is extremely important. The entry point for this type of algorithm is probably more private. It’s extremely costly. You’re talking about a lot of servers. We’re talking about a lot of highly trained personnel to write and tune the algorithms. So, to do it well, it’s probably going to be done by a company, a for profit company that then is going to bridge and make deals with a public company.”

Korosec, who is also the co-founder of EpiSense, a disease tracking health app, that also uses machine learning, acknowledges the fears surrounding AI, but says he sees great benefits, as well.

“There are elements of artificial intelligence that also frighten me. But there are also extreme positives that could really allow humanity to benefit. And one of them is a disruptive service in the healthcare sector. Like we can truly individualize health care and have sort of a wrapper, an AI wrapper that is then aiding your family practitioner or doctors actively, while they’re performing their practice,” said Korosec.

Korosec says a lot of the work on this research project was done from his home in Goderich, which serves as his base for life and work.

“It’s the perfect balance for our family to live in small town Ontario, to raise my family here, to raise my daughter here, and to give her this experience that I had growing up, because it’s just a fantastic place to live,” he said.