Personalized medicine: hope or hype
Nicholas Wald, Joan K. Morris · European Heart Journal · 2012
This editorial refers to ‘Personalized medicine: hope or hype?’ by K. Salari et al., on page 1564 As Salari et al.1 state in their recent study, medicine has always been personalized. As more is learnt about diseases, their causes, and how they can be treated, diseases become better characterized. The definitions of diseases become more specific and treatments more tailored to achieve improved outcomes in those who stand to benefit. At the same time, potentially toxic or expensive treatments are avoided in those who do not. The genetic characterization of diseases and response to treatments is no different from this process of improving the classification and treatment of disease that has been part of the development of medicine for over a hundred years. Improving the specificity of disease recognition and treatment in a rational way is neither hope nor hype. It is simply good medicine. The cost of sequencing a human genome has tumbled from about US$1 billion in 2001 to less than US$10 000 in 20112 and soon it is expected to be less than US$1000. This reduction in cost will create intense pressure to move such testing from research into clinical medicine. Before being adopted, the value of such testing will need to be assessed critically and will need to satisfy the criteria for a worthwhile screening or diagnostic test.