Principles of Precision Medicine

Abstract

Precision medicine principles have long been a pillar of medical practice. Precision (personalized) medicine is a new medical approach that uses a patient’s genetic profile to guide decisions about disease prevention, diagnosis, and treatment. The goal of precision medicine is to combine current medicine with molecular breakthroughs to target patients individually and increase the efficacy and effectiveness of the therapeutic strategy. Pharmacogenomics (PGx) is one of the most important components of personalized medicine now used to describe how various genetic variants throughout the genome can affect drug response, whereas pharmacogenetics is the study of single DNA variation related to the drug response. The concept of precision medicine appears to hold promising results, and some of the potential benefits of precision medicine are increasing the effectiveness of care, preventive medicine, cost-effectiveness, new disease taxonomy, and population healthcare. In this chapter, we present a review of principles of precision medicine.