Legal Aspects of Personalized Medicine
Ulrich Becker
Abstract Personalized medicine (PM) aims at improving the efficiency of medical
measures by determining the health care measure on the basis of the patient’s
biological information. It can be applied in the preventive field, as well as within
the framework of medical therapies. A combination of diagnostics and therapies
represents the main scope of PM in today’s health care systems, especially regard-
ing cancer treatment. In this sense, PM allows to tailor the treatment according to
the genetic information of the patient.
PM gives rise to a number of legal questions. First, personalized diagnostics and
pharmaceuticals face difficulties in accessing the market and the health care
systems under the current conditions, as these do not take into account the special
features of the individualized health care approach. Second, the issue of data
protection deserves particular attention, concerning the right to privacy of the
patient and his or her relatives, as well as the collection and use of data for research
purposes.
1 Introduction
Personalized medicine is a somewhat glittering generality, and it is a phrase that
seems to have the effect to divide the world—at least the world of those persons
who work for, and within, public health systems, pharmaceutical industries, health
professions, and the health science and health media in a broad sense. To one part of
them, it gives rise to very high-flying expectations: that personalized medicine is a
key element that can make the efforts to provide effective health care become true.
In this sense, personalized medicine is an important instrument to achieve better
efficiency of medical measures, both in an economical as well as in a medical
perspective. To the other part, it is not much more but an empty promise, a dream
that will one day, like a balloon with too much air, simply burst. The scepticism is
Professor Ulrich Becker, Ph.D. LL.M. Director of Max Planck Institute for Social Law and Social
Policy, Munich, Germany.
U. Becker, Ph.D. (*)
Max Planck Institute for Social Law and Social Policy, Munich, Germany
e-mail:[email protected]
©Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016
N. Bodiroga-Vukobrat et al. (eds.),Personalized Medicine,Europeanization and
Globalization 2, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-39349-0_2
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