According to the Precision Medicine Initiative, precision medicine is “an emerging approach for disease treatment and prevention that takes into account individual variability in genes, environment, and lifestyle for each person.”
This approach will allow doctors and researchers to predict more accurately which treatment and prevention strategies for a particular disease will work in which groups of people.
It is in contrast to a one-size-fits-all approach, in which disease treatment and prevention strategies are developed for the average person, with less consideration for the differences between individuals.
What is the difference between precision medicine and personalized medicine? What about pharmacogenomics?
There is a lot of overlap between the terms “precision medicine” and “personalized medicine.”
According to the National Research Council, “personalized medicine” is an older term with a meaning similar to “precision medicine.” However, there was concern that the word “personalized” could be misinterpreted to imply that treatments and preventions are being developed uniquely for each individual; in precision medicine, the focus is on identifying which approaches will be effective for which patients based on genetic, environmental, and lifestyle factors.
The Council therefore preferred the term “precision medicine” to “personalized medicine.” However, some people still use the two terms interchangeably.
Source: NIH U.S. National Library of Medicine
Resource: https://ghr.nlm.nih.gov/primer/precisionmedicine/definition
