regulatory frameworks, models of health service payment, and ethical, legal, and
social issues. All participants in this process will be assigned some new roles.
Health professionals will have to make decisions based on complex biological and
environmental information and lifestyle. Bioscientists and technologists will have
to closely cooperate and fulfill the needs of medical professionals responsible for
patients’care. Citizens will have a unique opportunity as well as responsibility for
their own healthviaactive monitoring, prevention and measures, and even direct
treatment selection.
4 What Personalized Medicine Has to Offer?
This question should be considered from the point of view of individuals, medical
staff, and health insurance, i.e., stakeholders. When it comes to an individual, this
primarily means a deviation from the one-size-fits-all approach towards the system
in which health care is based on the individual biological feature of each subject
within the framework of specific sociocultural and environmental context. For a
patient, it implies safer and more efficient treatment. For those wishing to partic-
ipate in such system for a long-term period, it means individually tailored therapy
and preventive strategy based on continuous monitoring of biological profile.
When it comes to health professionals, safety and accuracy of therapeutic
decision will be raised due to more efficient individualized therapy. Better therapy
will be the consequence of better diagnostics (and improvement of the decision-
making system due to the advancement of information and communication tech-
nology). All of these will result in better relation between the patient and medical
doctor. Great amount of information poses new challenges to the medical doctors,
including education. Personalized medicine will be developing in parallel with
disease reclassification. Current classification is based on the symptoms character-
istic for one organ or system. With the advent of biology, classification will be
based on molecular pathways involved in the process. This change in disease
taxonomy is of particular importance to chronic diseases (e.g., inflammatory), as
many of them share common aetiology in spite of differences in individual pheno-
types. New disease reclassification will allow the current drugs to be administered
with higher success rates and will provide the opportunity to successfully apply
those drugs in particular stratified patient groups that were previously shown to be
ineffective. Personalized medicine will allow collection and monitoring of data
during lifetime. Such approach allows better prevention and an early intervention.
Individuals will be able to create their own databases of physiological data and to
promptly identify pathological changes without the need to study data obtained in
larger population.
6 K. Pavelic ́et al.