Personalized Medicine

The June 2010 issue of Drug Discovery News contains an article by Professor Peter T Kissinger entitled "What is Personalized Medicine?" He makes the point that new terms seem to imply new approaches. Professor Kissinger makes a number of other observations that should be of importance to those involved in drug discovery and drug development. The web edition of the New York Times (for June 13, 2010) contains an article suggesting that genomic research has not delivered the expected while the Friday news reported that the FDA is treated home genome discovery kits as devices rather than scientific toys. My point is that we seem to be enamored by new words to describe old stuff - some years ago I wrote an aticle about new wine in old bottles (or perhaps it was old wineskins) - in any event, a bad idea. There are those who seem to think that by coining terms such as personalized medicine and translational research will somehow substitute for new ideas. There is great emphasis on the development of new technologies when in fact some approaches, such the evaluation of tumor cell sensitivity to chemotherapy (1) has been in use for at least twenty years. As noted by O Collinson (2), while there appears to be a new biomarker every week, there are only two established biomarkers for cardiac disease; cardiac troponin for differential diagnosis of acute coronary syndrome and B type natriuretic peptide for differential diagnosis of cardiac failure.

1. Elledge, R.M., Clark. G.M., Hon, J., et al., Rapid in vitro assay for predicting response to fluorouracil in patients with metastatic breast cancer, J.Clin.Oncol.13, 419-423, 1995.

2. O Collinson, P., Cardiac markers, Br.J.Hosp.Med. 70, M84-M87, 2009.