Precision oncology: mind the disruption

Over the last two decades, treatment outcomes have improved markedly for a number of cancer types, including breast cancer, lung cancer and melanoma. Some of these improvements can be attributed to the steady development of new treatments. However, what has been very different in this period is the introduction of a different approach to healthcare management. Precision medicine is a strategy of customizing health management to individual predisposition and condition subtype, instead of the conventional approach of applying a standardized management. In oncology, a move towards precision medicine has been motivated by an accumulating number of paradigms that have demonstrated its significant health and financial value. However, shifting to this type of medicine entails many disruptions to current research and clinical practices, including the introduction of new disciplines and structures, new levels of multidisciplinary co-operation, new approaches to health regulation and economics and the generation of new information on inter-population clinical and molecular features. In this article, we look back at key events in precision oncology to relate the motivation behind the shift and understand the upcoming issues in realizing the immense potential of precision medicine.