The Future of Medicine Lies in Customisation of this kind

Why Personalised Healthcare is so important?

‘It is more important to know what sort of person has a disease than what sort of Disease a person has.’ This verdict on the importance of gearing one’s healing efforts to the individual patient rather than the disease was uttered by Hippocrates, the most famous physician of antiquity.

The modern term for this approach is ‘Personalised Healthcare’.

Some 2,400 years after Hippocrates, it is driving a genuine revolution based on the scientific realisation that individuals are different – and so are diseases.

Personalised Healthcare aims to provide targeted therapies tailored to the inherited or acquired risk factors displayed by different subgroups of patients. The foundations for this new, highly sensitive approach are the findings produced by modern research; research that is able to trace the origins of a disease back to its molecular causes and thus supply spectacular insights into the complexity of the factors that lead to disease.

The research work of the last few years has many important successes to its credit. Today, many patients are receiving individual diagnoses and targeted therapies.

Headlong progress in the sciences related to molecular biology – genetics, genomics, and proteomics is broadening the foundations for progress of this kind, so it is safe to predict that in the near future many more patients will benefit from such new approaches.

Personalised Healthcare gets down to the molecular roots of disease

What makes individuals so similar and at the same time so unique? And what exactly goes on in the body when people are healthy or sick?

These questions have always intrigued scientists, but it took molecular biology to come up with the really important answers. Major milestones were the discovery of the double helix (the structure of the ‘life molecule ’DNA) in the early 1950s and the sequencing of the human genome at the beginning of the new millennium.

Today, findings from new branches of research like genomics or proteomics enable researchers to refine their understanding of diseases at the molecular level.

This is the basis for innovative strategies combining new diagnostic procedures and ongoing biotechnological progress to fight diseases more effectively than ever before.