Open AccessOn the bumpy road towards ‘personalized medicine’
Author(s) -
Francke Uta
Publication year - 2010
Publication title -
embo molecular medicine
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 4.923
H-Index - 107
eISSN - 1757-4684
pISSN - 1757-4676
DOI - 10.1002/emmm.200900056
Subject(s) - personalized medicine , precision medicine , health care , genomic medicine , alternative medicine , genomics , medicine , family medicine , medical education , bioinformatics , political science , genetics , law , genome , pathology , biology , computational biology , gene
My uncle who practiced general medicine in a German village all his life wouldn't understand what I'm talking about: the care of his patients was always highly personalized. A new vision of ‘personalized medicine’ arose in contrast to current medical practice that relies on standards of care derived from epidemiologic studies of large cohorts. New molecular methods increasingly will allow us to peak into individual genomes and encourage a design of individualized prevention and treatment plans that may well deviate from the standard of practice now tailored to the ‘average’ person.In 2007, the Junior Senator from Illinois, Barack Obama, introduced Senate Bill S. 976 entitled ‘Genomics and Personalized Medicine Act of 2007’. This bill, which died in Congress in 2008, defined personalized medicine in the modern sense as ‘the application of genomic and molecular data to better target the delivery of health care, facilitate the discovery and clinical testing of new products, and help determine a person's predisposition to a particular disease or condition’. The bill would have provided a framework for support and oversight.Where are we stuck on the road to using genomics to tailor medical care to individuals based on their genetic makeup, and how can EMBO Molecular Medicine be of help? The human genome project, the international effort that led to the publication of a draft human DNA sequence in …