[Personalized therapy for diabetes in retrospect and prospect]

In recent years, the term "personalized medicine" has been increasingly mentioned in relation to the endeavours to tailor the pharmaceutical as well as regimen therapy to the needs and requirements of individual patients. The personalization of antidiabetic treatment has undergone a dramatic advancement in relation to the expansion of knowledge about diabetes. From the empirical it moved forward to the phenotypic level which made it possible to differentiate between individual types of diabetes. The pathogenetic personalization which began to be used within Type 2 diabetes in the 1960s, was based on the assumption that while insulin resistance predominates in some patients, others are mainly affected by insulin secretion deficit. Biostatistics-personalized medicine (evidence based medicine) gathered evidence based on which metformin was included in recommendations on the therapy for Type 2 diabetes as a first-line drug. Although randomized studies during the first decade of the 21st century did not prove superiority of any other treatment modality as an adjunctive therapy used with metformin, they brought with them individualization of the goals of glycemic con-trol. At present, personalization is heading towards the pharmacogenetic level that will enable in the near future individualized therapy in terms of choice of first-, second- and third-line drugs depending on the panel of key gene polymorphisms which characterize sensitivity of an individual to specific antidiabetics. Finally, the "tailor-maded therapy" should be chosen based on a synthesis of pathogenetic, biostatistic and pharmacogenetic knowledge that will reflect the translation of results of the basic biomedical research into the clinical practice.Key words: evidence based medicine - pathogenesis - personalized therapy - pharmacogenetics - type 2 diabetes.