ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews the definition and perspectives of precision medicine versus personalized medicine relevant to research and clinical practice. It examines the existing and future technologies that could speed the development of herbal products for personalized cancer chemotherapy leading to enhanced efficacy and reduced cost for treatment of resistant cancer in individual patients. As genetic variations/mutations are often important factors relating to a particular disease as well as drug response, the first essential step for precision medicine would be the identification of such mutations in specific genes at multiple cell regulatory levels. Precision medicine can involve a single drug or combination of drugs. A good example of single drug is pembrolizumab for metastatic non-small cell lung cancer whose tumor cells express programmed death ligand 1 and progress after platinum-based chemotherapy. While precision medicine and personalized medicine are often synonymous in cancer chemotherapy, the initiating steps could be different in drug development versus practice.
