Preventive and Predictive Genetics: Towards Personalised Medicine

Pharmacogenomics supports personalized medicine by translating genome-based knowledge into clinical practice, offering enhanced benefit for patients and health-care systems at large. Current routine practice for diagnosing and treating patients is conducted by correlating parameters such as age, gender and weight with risks and expected treatment outcomes. In the new era of personalized medicine the healthcare provider is equipped with improved ability to prevent, diagnose, treat and predict outcomes on the basis of complex information sources, including genetic and genomic data. Targeted therapy and reliable prediction of expected outcomes offer patients access to better healthcare management, by way of identifying the therapies effective for the relevant patient group, avoiding prescription of unnecessary treatment and reducing the likelihood of developing adverse drug reactions.