Consequently, the need for new, personalized medicine has arisen that would bring
about radical changes in health care systems. Such approach represents a shift from
the era of blockbuster drugs designed to treat all patients suffering from the same
disease towards individualized treatment based on unique features of each patient.
Medicine has been lately fragmented, which has produced a certain fragmented
approach towards patients. A paradoxical situation occurs where medicine has
reached a high level of technological advancement on the one hand, but on the
other hand, an integrated perception of the patient functioning as a result of overall
organ activities has been neglected. It is the personalized medicine approach that
places emphasis on the patient with all his/her biological features.^1 Personalized
medicine is a new paradigm that represents a shift from current simplified consid-
eration of the patient as a member of the population sharing common fate of disease
towards the view that each patient is a unique individual. Indeed, medicine should
primarily deal with an individual rather than with the majority. Every person has
specific genomic/proteomic and metabolic signature that could account for specific
clinical features of disease, response to treatment and disease severity. Therefore,
disease and the treatment itself should be considered individually. Previously, the
pharmaceutical industry assumed an attitude that “one drug fits all.” However, such
concept is about to change. Today, personalized medicine supports the idea that
drugs should be designed and prescribed according to an individual pharmaco-
genomics profile.^2 To put it simply, up to now science and medicine have studied
diseases and drawn conclusions based on only a few parameters. Nowadays, we
know that humans have more than 20,000 genes and million different protein forms.
If we want to ascertain the roles of all these genes and proteins along with different
metabolites, lipids, glycolipids, etc. in disease pathogenesis, we have to explore all
of them. This makes the essence of new, complex, and comprehensive molecular
view of life and the world. It is rather naive to believe that studying a few
parameters would allow us to learn more about disease mechanisms and thus
prevent or treat diseases. Medicine has been so far successful in studying diseases
on the basis of the reductionist view. However, reductionism provides limited
answers to basic questions such as how biological systems function as a whole,
how they process dynamic information, and how they respond to perturbations such
as diseases. It is the complexity of biological systems that urges us to adopt a new
approach to medical research. Biological functions are the result of combined
activities of multiple molecular and cellular functions. Live systems act in a
nonlinear fashion, i.e., one input often produces multiple outputs. Therefore, there
are justified reasons to introduce a new paradigm in medicine so as to expand
current knowledge of disease origins and causes, biological markers for early
detection or disease stage, and molecular factors that affect the efficiency of
potential drugs.^3
(^1) Pavelic ́et al. ( 2015 ).
(^2) Bosˇnjak et al. ( 2008 ) and Kralj and Pavelic ́( 2003 ).
(^3) Catchpoole et al. ( 2010 ).
2 K. Pavelic ́et al.