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Personalized medicine, also referred to as precision medicine, is a medical model that separates people into different groups—with medical decisions, practices, interventions and/or products being tailored to the individual patient based on their predicted response or risk of disease.[1] The terms personalized medicine, precision medicine, stratified medicine and P4 medicine are used interchangeably to describe this concept,[1][2] though some authors and organizations differentiate between these expressions based on particular nuances.[2] P4 is short for "predictive, preventive, personalized and participatory".[2]
While the tailoring of treatment to patients dates back at least to the time of Hippocrates,[3] the usage of the term has risen in recent years thanks to the development of new diagnostic and informatics approaches that provide an understanding of the molecular basis of disease, particularly genomics. This provides a clear biomarker on which to stratify related patients.[1][4][5]
Among the 14 Grand Challenges for Engineering, an initiative sponsored by National Academy of Engineering (NAE), personalized medicine has been identified as a key and prospective approach to "achieve optimal individual health decisions", therefore overcoming the challenge to "engineer better medicines".[6][7]