ABSTRACT
In recent years, individualised or personalised medicine (IM/PM) 2 has become a buzzword in the academic as well as public debate surrounding health care. Promising to make health care more effective and efficient by tailored medical interventions it has become one of the core areas of public research funding and pharmaceutical research investment (Vollmann, 2013). However, PM lacks a clear definition and is open to interpretation (Schleidgen and Marckmann, 2013). Consequently, a whole continuum of PM understandings exists, in which three main positions can be identified: (a) PM is not a new concept as medicine has always been individualised; (b) PM is holistic health care centred on the needs of the individual patient; and (c) PM is treatment targeted at stratified subgroups (for example, pharmacogenetics) (Müller, 2012).
