Personalized medicine: A paradigm shift in healthcare

Personalized medicine is based on the established principle that each individual is born with unique biological characteristics. Genomics, the science of studying the genes in a genome and their interactions with each other, forms the foundation of personalized medicine. Several genomic methods are currently used to identify susceptibility loci for diseases or phenotypic traits, namely, linkage analysis, candidate gene association studies, and genome-wide association studies. The success of personalized medicine depends on having accurate diagnostic tests capable of identifying patients who can benefit from targeted therapy. Larger cohort studies plus the application of genome-wide association studies offer great potential for identifying the genetic factors that influence the pharmacology of specific drugs. By combining these approaches, physicians can predict health risks, determine and quantify the dynamics of disease development, and tailor therapeutic protocols to the needs of the individual. In this review, we focus on the effect of genetic profiling on disease outcomes as well as the potential of genomic methods to predict disease and drug response.