Current Status and Prospects of Personalized Medicine in Drug Therapy Impact of Advances in Basic Research on Drug Development
Akira Nagumo (Senior Researcher, Pharmaceutical and Industrial Policy Research Institute)
(No.56: Published in March 2013)
Personalized medicine is defined as medical treatment that takes into account a patient's genetic background, physiological condition, and disease status to establish the optimal treatment for each individual patient. The most advanced application of personalized medicine is in the field of drug therapy, where the goal is to maximize therapeutic efficacy and minimize side effects for individual patients, i.e., to "provide the right medicine to the right patient, at the right time, and in the right amount". Advancement of personalized medicine is expected to bring various benefits to patients, medical professionals, the pharmaceutical industry, and the government, such as availability of drugs with high efficacy, safety, and effectiveness rates; provision of efficient medical care by avoiding trial-and-error medical selection; enhancement of industrial competitiveness by promoting new drug development and improving efficiency of drug development; and reduction of medical costs by promoting early recovery from diseases and preventive medicine. The benefits are expected to be various for patients, medical professionals, the pharmaceutical industry, the government, and others. In recent years, personalized medicine has been partially realized through remarkable progress in research in the life science field. This paper clarifies the purpose, significance, and methodology of personalized medicine, which is expected to be one of the next-generation medical treatments, surveys trends in academia and industry, and discusses challenges and prospects for the realization of personalized medicine.