Personalized medicine in pulmonary hypertension

Pulmonary hypertension is aheterogeneous group of diseases that is characterized by an increased mean pulmonary arterial pressure. Personalized medicine aims to individualize the treatment to the characteristics of the patient and the disease in order to improve the response to treatment and the outcome. This article describes the current and future approaches for implementation of personalized medicine for pulmonary hypertension. By use of the etiological classification, vasoreactivity testing, risk stratification, genetic testing and also consideration of clinical characteristics, such as age and sex, apersonalization of treatment is already being applied. In the future pharmacogenetic investigations could help to predict the response to existing and new medical treatments. Using omics technologies new insights are gained not only in the area of the genome and transcriptome but also the epigenome, metabolome and proteome. These insights could be used for further subclassification of patient groups and development of new personalized treatments.