Personalized medicine or PM is a medical model that proposes the customization of healthcare - with medical decisions, practices, and/or products being tailored to the individual patient. In

this model, diagnostic testing is often employed for selecting appropriate and optimal therapies based on the context of a patient’s genetic content or other molecular or cellular analysis.[1] The

use of genetic information has played a major role in certain aspects of personalized medicine (e.g. pharmacogenomics), and the term was first coined in the context of genetics, though it has

since broadened to encompass all sorts of personalization measures.[1]

Contents

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1 Background

o 1.1 Basics

o 1.2 Method

o 1.3 Disease Risk Assessment

2 Applications

o 2.1 Diagnosis and Intervention

o 2.2 Drug Development and Usage

o 2.3 Cancer Genomics

3 Challenges

o 3.1 Regulatory Oversight

o 3.2 Intellectual Property Rights

o 3.3 Reimbursement Policies

o 3.4 Patient Privacy and Confidentiality

4 References

Background[edit]

Personalized Medicine Wheel

Basics[edit]Every person has a unique variation of the human genome.[2] Although most of the variation between individuals has no effect on health, an individual's health stems from genetic variation with

behaviors and influences from the environment.[3]

One way that biological variation among people makes itself clear, is responsiveness to drugs: ADHD medicine only works for one of ten preschoolers, cancer drugs are effective for 25% of

patients, and depression drugs work with 6 of 10 patients.[4]

Modern advances in personalized medicine rely on technology that confirms a patient's fundamental biology, DNA, RNA, or protein, which ultimately leads to confirming disease. For example,

personalized medicine techniques such as genome sequencing can reveal mutations in DNA that influence diseases ranging from cystic fibrosis to cancer. Another method, called RNA-seq,

can show which RNA’s are involved with specific diseases. Unlike DNA, levels of RNA change in response to the environment. Therefore, sequencing RNA can reveal a broader understanding

of a person’s state of health. Methods of RNA-seq are very similar to genome sequencing.

Method[edit]