Personalised medicine. Aims and challenges

Personalised medicine will address the clinical and pathophysiologic complexity of many diseases with the aim of developing therapeutic strategies more adapted for selected individuals or patient subgroups in order to improve efficacy and safety of medicinal products. This biomarker-based approach will potentially allow identification of populations at risk for chronic and life-threatening diseases and to design early intervention strategies. Personalised medicine will lead to a substantial move from costly and often inefficient health care to a hopefully more cost effective, more targeted and more preventive approach addressing participative patients with increased health literacy. Thus, it provides the basement for an ultimate paradigm shift of modern medicine, away from a "reactive" medicine to a more "proactive" and personalised health care, so-called "P4 medicine".