The Promise and Challenges of Personalized Medicine in Hematologic Malignancies

Personalized medicine is a rapidly emerging medical model that proposes individually customized healthcare to potentially increase the quality of clinical care and reduce health care costs. The key to the success of personalized medicine is development of diagnostics and therapeutics based upon molecular, genetic, epigenetic, pharmacogenomic and metabolic features of individual patients. Personalized medicine in oncology seeks to individualize cancer care and treatment decisions based upon features unique to each patient and each patient's tumor. Medical decisions are then being tailored to the individual patient with the hope of providing improved quality-of-life and overall survival. Diagnostic testing is employed to select appropriate and optimal therapies based upon the context of each patient's genetic content or other molecular or cellular tests. The concept of personalized medicine hopes to not only enhance the patient quality of life and survival but also to lower overall healthcare costs through early-detection, prevention, accurate risk assessments and more efficient health care delivery systems. However, personalized approaches in oncology face major, complex scientific and economic problems. Here, we discuss certain scientific and economic challenges that face the future of personalized medicine in the treatment of hematologic malignancies.