Personalized medicine: Striding from genes to medicines

Personalized medicine has the potential of revolutionizing patient care. This treatment modality prescribes therapies specific to individual patients based on pharmacogenetic and pharmacogenomic information. The mapping of the human genome has been an important milestone in understanding the interindividual differences in response to therapy. These differences are attributed to genotypic differences, with consequent phenotypic expression. It is important to note that targeted therapies should ideally be accompanied by a diagnostic marker. However, most efforts are being directed toward developing both these separately; the former by pharmaceutical companies and the later by diagnostic companies. Further, this companion strategy will be successful only when the biomarkers assayed are differentiated on a value-based approach rather than a cost-based approach, especially in countries that reimburse disease management costs. The advantages of using personalized therapies are manifold: targeted patient population; avoidance of drug-related toxicities and optimization of costs in nonresponder patients; reduction in drug development costs, and fewer patients to be tested in clinical trials. The success of personalized therapy in future will depend on a better understanding of pharmacogenomics and the extension of these scientific advances to all countries.