Adding the ‘medicines’ back into personalized medicine to improve cancer treatment outcomes
The excitement surrounding the newly redefined concept of ‘Personalized medicine’ was ignited in the Wall Street Journal in 1999. This heralded a ‘New Era of Personalized Medicine’ to ‘target drugs for each unique genetic profile’ 1, spurred on by an era of apparently targeted therapies. Today, personalized medicine has been redefined to ‘Precision medicine’ to incorporate genomics and aimed at developing new targets, treatments and optimized therapy. Ideally, the clinician's concept of personalized medicine is about the right drug, dose, patient and time. Additionally it involves basic principles of pharmacological and clinical medicine. Although personalized medicine embodies the culture of clinical pharmacology, this Editorial alerts to the paradox that lack of the input of clinical pharmacology into personalized medicine has led to incomplete translation of genomic data into the optimal choice and application of cancer drugs and the funding decisions of public access to therapies.