Precision medicine ― A promising, yet challenging road lies ahead

Precision medicine proposes to individualize the practice of medicine based on patients' genetic backgrounds, their biomarker characteristics and other omics datasets. After outlining the key challenges in precision medicine, namely patient stratification, biomarker discovery and drug repurposing, we survey recent developments in high-throughput technologies and big biological datasets that shape the future of precision medicine. Furthermore, we provide an overview of recent data-integrative approaches that have been successfully used in precision medicine for mining medical knowledge from big-biological data, and we highlight modeling and computing issues that such integrative approaches will face due to the ever-growing nature of big-biological data. Finally, we raise attention to the challenges in translational medicine when moving from research findings to approved medical practices.