29. PERSONALIZED MEDICINE-

♤ Personalized medicine is a young but rapidly advancing field of healthcare that is informed by each person's unique clinical, genetic, genomic, and environmental information. Because these factors are different for every person, the nature of diseases—including their onset, their course, and how they might respond to drugs or other interventions—is as individual as the people who have them.

♤ Personalized medicine is about making the treatment as individualized as the disease. It involves identifying genetic, genomic, and clinical information that allows accurate predictions to be made about a person's susceptibility of developing disease, the course of disease, and its response to treatment.

♤ Specific advantages that personalized medicine may offer patients and clinicians include:

 Ability to make more informed medical decisions

 Higher probability of desired outcomes thanks to better-targeted therapies

 Reduced probability of negative side effects

 Focus on prevention and prediction of disease rather than reaction to it

 Earlier disease intervention than has been possible in the past

 Reduced healthcare cost