What is Personalised Medicine? The Challenges, Benefits and Future developments

When it comes to medicine, there’s a growing realisation that one size does not fit all. While treatments and prevention strategies might work for certain patients, there’s a chance they won’t help others. This is driving the growing interest in personalised medicine designed to provide the best cure for the needs of individual patients.

Currently, if two patients present with the same illness, they are usually prescribed the same cure.
That’s because physicians tend to recommend medical interventions based on what works best for patients on average. But that can mean the many patients who fall outside of this “average” are unlikely to receive the best care possible – and in some cases, this can have grave results. The solution could be personalised, or precision, medicine.

Personalised medicine is a relatively new approach to diagnosis, treatment and prevention that’s targeted at individual patients, and is proving to be one of the most promising approaches to tackling disease. This is especially the case with illnesses that lack effective treatments or cures, such as neurodegenerative diseases, rare genetic conditions, and, perhaps most prominently, cancer.

Here we look at the innovations, benefits and challenges in this emerging field of medicine.