Published 2019-04-06
Abstract
Precision medicine has been thought to revolutionize how we improve health and treat disease. Today, most medical treatments are designed for the average patient using the “one-size-fits-all” approach. However, in many cases, this approach isn’t effective because treatments can be very successful for some patients but not for others. Precision medicine is a field of medicine that takes into account individual differences in people’s genes, micro biomes, environments, family history, and lifestyles to make diagnostic and therapeutic strategies precisely tailored to individual patients. Precision medicine is a newer term referring to a similar field compared to another term “personalized medicine”. The term ‘precision medicine’ entered the scientific lexicon in 2008 when business strategist Clayton Christensen, of Harvard Business School in Boston, coined the expression to describe how molecular diagnostics allows physicians to unambiguously diagnose the cause of a disease without having to rely on intuition [1-4]. The name didn’t gain traction until 2011 when a committee convened by the US National Research Council laid out a blueprint for modernizing the taxonomy of disease on the basis of molecular information such as causal genetic variants, rather than a symptom-based classification system. They called the report Toward Precision Medicine