Personalized medicine
Personalized medicine is fundamentally about targeting the right treatment for the right patient at the right time. As increasing amounts of information about a patient may be efficiently collected, analyzed, and retrieved, it is increasingly possible to target both medical treatment and preventive care to the individual in question. Personalized medicine as a health care paradigm has in many ways been made possible by informatics. At the same time, personalized medicine has served to shape the direction of the field, inspiring the establishment of the relatively young branch known as translational bioinformatics (TBI). It has also informed many use cases that have guided advancements in the field. In this chapter, we explain what is meant by “personalized medicine” and its related concepts. We summarize key tenets from molecular biology that are necessary to understand recent technological advances in high-throughput biological methodologies, and give an overview of those advances. We highlight a number of hot topics in personalized medicine and TBI, and conclude with discussion of how personalized medicine impacts the different stakeholder groups within biomedicine.
