Overview

Personalized medicine is a paradigm shift in medical treatment, health economy as well as translational medicine. In the first half of the 20th century during the introduction of therapeutic approaches the results achieved by physiological process – supported mainly with animal experiments – were extrapolated and the investigations were conducted mainly on animals, tissues and cells. Daily, routine therapeutic practice was based on these observations, case reports and to a significant degree on the intuition of the doctor. This method resulted in a great praxis variation. In the second half of the 20th century however therapeutic decisions were increasingly determined by results based on clinical epidemiological research methods and on multi-centre, randomized, controlled studies involving thousands of patients. Nowadays due to the development of molecular biological technology personalized medicine is continuously expanding in addition to evidence-based medicine. During the treatment of the given disorder the clinical-specific traits and genomics of the individual, the overall environmental factors affecting the patient are integrated along with the particular characteristics of the illness. Personalized medicine facilitates prevention and optimizes health care and drug treatment strategy by understanding the molecular basis of different diseases, defining patient-subgroups and determining the tendencies to various illnesses of these groups. The aim is to set up the individualized treatment and preventive strategy adequate to the particular characteristics of the patients.