It is easy to imagine that the application of such new paradigm, i.e. studying the
complex patterns of life, would contribute to early disease detection even before the
occurrence of clinical symptoms, discovery of new more efficient drugs, and more
precise disease diagnosis. The implementation of high-throughput methods into
medical practice holds great promise to facilitate development of personalized
medicine. The main application of these methods in medicine is prevention, and
secondary, design of new, more efficient drugs.^4
New challenges that medicine has to cope with, its relative inefficiency and
development of sophisticated high-throughput global analytical methods that could
be easily implemented into clinical practice have led to the idea of establishing a
whole new paradigm in medicine. At the 55th Plenary Session of the committee of
European Medical Research Council, European Research Foundation in Copenha-
gen, Denmark, one of the authors of this paper put forward the project termed
“Forward look on personalized medicine for European citizens”, whose goal is to
implement state-of-the-art scientific and technological achievements (the so-called
high-throughput analytical methods) into everyday medical practice so as to make
health care better and more efficient. It comes without saying that an innovative
approach in medicine raises many scientific and social issues. The project has been
successfully completed, and personalized medicine has become one of the most
important medical topics under Horizon 2020.^5
2 Definition and Elements of Personalized Medicine
Personalized medicine is a term coined to describe systematic usage of information
on individual patients with the aim to select and optimize prevention and treatment.
In other words, personalized medicine is a model of health care that customizes
individual differences of the patient in all phases—form prevention, diagnosis and
treatment up to post-treatment monitoring. Synonyms like genomic medicine,
stratification medicine, and precise medicine can be commonly found in literature.
Although these are undoubtedly important aspects, the term personalized medicine
is multidimensional and broader and encompasses pharmacogenetics, pharmaco-
genomics, pharmacoproteomics, predictive medicine, rational drug selection, sys-
tems medicine, individually tailored therapy, translational medicine, etc. All of
them represent elements of one integrated, new medicine.^6
Genomic medicine is an important part of personalized medicine. The necessity
for development of personalized medicine stems from large quantity of data
obtained by the human genome sequencing. Personalized medicine largely relies
on predicting disease risk, treatment response, and safety profile based on genome
sequence data. Several important projects, in particular human genome sequencing
(^4) Bosˇnjak et al. ( 2008 ), Kraljevic et al. ( 2006 ), and Van’t Veer and Bernards ( 2008 ).
(^5) ESF Forward Look ( 2012 ).
(^6) Aspinall and Hamermesh ( 2007 ).
Personalized Medicine: The Path to New Medicine 3