Abstract
Personalized medicine is a popular term – meaning diagnosis and treatment adapted to a given condition and/or gene defect. Progress in biomedicine is making the analysis of an individual’s DNA increasingly faster and cheaper, which has already had a significant effect on diagnosis and treatment and will increasingly contribute to more precise diagnosis of various diseases. Some of them may be “druggable,” that is, an appropriate medicament may exist or be developed for them. In the long term, this should be cost-effective and save money spent on useless treatments; on the other hand, currently most of these treatments are expensive, not very many are available, and problems of their equitable distribution are quite obvious. Moreover, there is also the problem of resource allocation – whether the always limited funds for medical care should be invested in possible future treatment or rather used for addressing current patient needs using available drugs and therapies.
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Further Readings
FDA, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Paving the way for personalized medicine. FDA’s role in a new era of medical product development. http://www.fda.gov/downloads/ScienceResearch/SpecialTopics/PersonalizedMedicine/UCM372421.pdf. Accessed 20 Nov 2015.
Personalised Medicine for the European citizen – Towards more precise medicine for the diagnosis, treatment and prevention of disease iPM http://www.esf.org/uploads/media/Personalised_Medicine.pdf. Accessed 20 Nov 2015.
Personalized Medicine Coalition. (2014). The case for personalized medicine (4th ed.), http://www.personalizedmedicinecoalition.org/Resources/The_Case_for_Personalized_Medicine. Accessed 20 Nov 2015.
Vogenberg, F. R., Barash, C. I., & Pursel, M. (2010). Personalized medicine. Part 3: Personalized medicine: Part 3: Challenges facing health care plans in implementing coverage policies for pharmacogenomic and genetic testing. Pharmacy and Therapeutics, 35, 670–675.
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Bartnik, E. (2016). Personalized Medicine. In: ten Have, H. (eds) Encyclopedia of Global Bioethics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-09483-0_334
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-09483-0_334
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