Stratified Medicine: Maximizing Clinical Benefit by Biomarker-Driven Health Care

Stratified medicine involves the use of biomarkers to differentiate patient populations into subsets that provide more detailed information about the specific causes of conditions, and predict how patients will respond to a given drug or combination of drugs. Biomarker-driven patient stratification can empower clinicians by providing accurate assessments of patient status (diagnostic and prognostic utility) in order to strategize treatment planning and delivery (predictive and monitoring utility) based on information extracted from biomarker profiles. This approach may also help presymptomatic individuals by delaying the onset of disease, minimize the severity of the disease, or possibly prevent disease occurrence. Patients and clinicians may benefit from this approach as it may allow for the transformation of current empirical 'medical practice' to efficient data-driven 'individualized therapeutic strategies' with a low risk of medical error. The health care industry may also benefit from this approach by designing clinical trials based on appropriate patient stratification. Here, recent advances in the field of stratified medicine are highlighted in the context of our efforts to integrate this rapidly evolving concept into our research, and to ultimately develop potential diagnostic/prognostic/predictive products and nutritional solutions for individual patients and consumers.