Personalized medicine: a paradigm for a sustainable pharmaceutical industry?

Personalized medicine is a custom-tailored approach to patient treatment based on individual genetic traits. In personalized medicine, a patient group is characterized by a clinical biomarker that has been correlated to a differential response to drug treatment. During the past decade, several developments in the understanding of the structure and function of the human genome have occurred that bring personalized medicine closer to becoming a reality. The promise of personalized medicine lies in a clinical biomarker-driven patient stratification, and focused smaller-sized clinical trials that result in a shorter development time and reduced overall development cost. Personalized medicine has the potential to offer a new business model for the pharmaceutical industry by providing a more efficient drug discovery process with reduced cost.