Personalized medicine and drug metabolism

Abstract

The Precision Medicine Initiative (a nationwide programsponsored by the United States National Institutes of Health) defines precisionmedicine as an emerging approach for disease treatment and prevention thattakes into account individual variability in genes, environment, and lifestylefor each person. Precision medicine is closely related to personalized andstratified medicine, and all these terms are frequently appliedinterchangeably, although subtle distinctions between them have been underlined.At present, it is clear that more efficacious and safer therapeuticinterventions are to be expected if tailored to the specific variations in aperson?s genome, transcriptome, proteome, and metabolome. The scope ofpersonalized medicine has been considerably expanded by genotyping technologies(particularly, next-generation sequencing and microarray biochips), as well asstate-of-the-art computing able to process large datasets.