Personalised Medicine

Personalised Medicine represents healthcare approaches tailoring medical decisions, practices, interventions, or products to individual patients based on their predicted response or disease risk, employing genetic information, biomarker measurements, environmental factors, or lifestyle data to optimise therapeutic strategies. This transformative paradigm promises improving treatment efficacy through selecting therapies most likely to benefit individual patients, reducing adverse effects, and enhancing healthcare efficiency.

The biopharmaceutical industry has embraced personalised medicine throughout drug development, with targeted cancer therapies requiring companion diagnostics identifying patients whose tumours harbour specific mutations, pharmacogenomic testing guiding drug selection and dosing, and biomarker-selected clinical trials enriching for responders. Implementation strategies encompass genetic testing identifying inherited variants affecting drug metabolism or treatment response, somatic tumour profiling detecting acquired mutations guiding targeted therapy selection, and expression biomarkers predicting outcomes or treatment responses. Enabling technologies include next-generation sequencing, liquid biopsy, multi-omics integration, and artificial intelligence analysing complex datasets. Challenges include demonstrating clinical utility, addressing healthcare disparities in genomic databases, managing costs, and ensuring appropriate interpretation of complex genomic information. As technologies advance, precision medicine continues transforming healthcare.