Group-based and personalized care in an age of genomic and evidence-based medicine: a reappraisal

This article addresses the philosophical and moral foundations of group-based and individualized therapy in connection with population care equality. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recently modified its public health policy by seeking to enhance the efficacy and equality of care through the approval of group-specific prescriptions and doses for some drugs. In the age of genomics, when individualization of care increasingly has become a major concern, investigating the relationship between population health, stratified medicine, and personalized therapy can improve our understanding of the ethical and biomedical implications of genomic medicine. I suggest that the need to optimize population health through population substructure-sensitive research and the need to individualize care through genetically targeted therapies are not necessarily incompatible. Accordingly, the article reconceptualizes a unified goal for modern scientific medicine in terms of individualized equal care.