What does the CPM mean by personalised medicine?

Medicine has always been personalised to some extent; health professionals use available data about a patient to predict or diagnose ill-health and select appropriate interventions and treatments.

Yet terms such as personalised medicine have been increasingly used over the last two decades to describe attempts to integrate new or previously unused data insights into healthcare to make better individual predictions, treatments or interventions.

Many different data types can be used to personalise medicine and much attention has been given to how genomic data might be used. However, other data types, such as epi-genomic and proteomic, and data about socio-demographic factors or early life life exposure, are equally important to consider in the personalisation of medicine for all.

Whilst we believe that personalised medicine is hugely powerful when done right, it also raises significant clinical, ethical, legal, economic and societal challenges. It is both these benefits and challenges that the CPM is here to discuss.