The Promise and the Hype of 'Personalised Medicine'
Abstract
Personalised medicine is widely considered as the way of the future for medicine. However, progress in cancer, with a few outstanding exceptions, has fallen below expectations because of the challenges of tumour heterogeneity and clonal evolution. In both benign and malignant disease, diseases caused by single genetic alterations are more amenable to precision medicine approaches. However, most common diseases are caused by a complex interplay of multiple genetic and environmental factors making personalised medicine far more challenging. The current optimism for personalised medicine is distorting clinical consultations, resource allocation and research funding prioritisation. A research active clinician must act both as an agent of change and development, and as a communicator of realism. Thus personalised medicine that includes a sober appreciation of what genomics can achieve, together with continued focus on the individual as a person not just as a genome, will contribute to further improvements in health and healthcare.
References
Citations
Implementation of precision medicine in clinical trials in thoracic oncology: Which are the hurdles?
Related Concepts
Related Feeds
Cancer Genomics (Keystone)
Cancer genomics approaches employ high-throughput technologies to identify the complete catalog of somatic alterations that characterize the genome, transcriptome and epigenome of cohorts of tumor samples. Discover the latest research using such technologies in this feed.