ABSTRACT
Precision Medicine (PM), also known as Personalized or Stratified Medicine, is a broad term used to describe application of the pharmacogenomic and biomarker sciences, along with novel dosing technologies, to the selection of the most appropriate therapeutic agents for individual cancer patients, the monitoring of treatment outcomes and side effects (ADRs) on an individual basis, and the discovery and development of new therapeutic agents with improved efficacy. This chapter begins with an introduction to Precision Medicine, and then describes in detail the uses of genomic information and SNPs, the various components of the Precision Medicine approach (e.g., pharmacogenetics, pharmacogenomics, metabonomics, biomarkers, and epigenetics), along with presently available (e.g., genome sequencing, proteomics, toxicogenomics, and metabonomics) and emerging (e.g., circulating cancer cells and tumor nucleic acids, epigenetics, microfluidics, multiplexing, and bio-informatics) technologies. Next, the applications of Precision Medicine are addressed such as screening for biomarkers that can predict the risk of disease development, including predisposition, optimal treatment, prognosis, staging, risk of recurrence, and treatment toxicity. The use of biomarkers in drug discovery and clinical trials is also described, along with a discussion of technologies being developed to personalize drug dosing. Finally, a brief conclusion and discussion of the future of Precision Medicine in oncology is provided.
