Translational medicine: path to personalized and public health

Abstract

Individualized medicine aims to provide personalized solutions based on patient-specific mole cular mechanisms of disease by transforming traditional healthcare practices that are applied to the population. Indeed, the individual variability in disease manifestation and treatment outcome, exemplars of challenges in today’s medicine, impede optimal patient management and compromise population health. This variability reflects current limitations in the knowledge base of disease processes and in the inadequate delivery of most promising healthcare solutions. Molecular sciences, including the evolving science of biomarkers, have catalyzed the development of diagnostic and thera peutic platforms tailored to the individual patient profile, paving the way for the deployment of individualized medicine approaches that address human variation and individualized medical need [1]. This next generation of medicine is largely enabled by technological breakthroughs that have led to advanced resolutions of disease states, guided development of prognostic discriminators of disease variability and selection of treatment response predictors [2]. Patient-centric algorithms, grounded in the individual’s genetic makeup, are emerging as the flagship of con temporary medicine [3]. The implementation of personalized practices, offering unprecedented opportunities for earlier diagnosis, effective prevention and disease cures, present a new era in medicine, and has the opportunity to transform the standard of care for individual patients and populations.