Abstract
The completion of the Human Genome Project was heralded as a step towards “personalized medicine,” offering patients individualized treatments based on genomic profiling. More recently, this vision has been eclipsed by the promise of “precision medicine” (PM), emphasizing benefits to patients from more precise diagnosis and treatment based on a range of biomarkers, along with data about patients’ environment, lifestyle, and behaviors.
Cynics may object that PM is mostly hype and exists primarily in documents whose very titles—e.g., “Toward Precision Medicine”—indicate their promissory nature. We disagree. PM is part of a longstanding attempt to reorient medical diagnosis and treatment to take advantage of genomics research and other approaches leveraging big data, such as electronic medical record research and crowd-sourced health tracking. These efforts are progressively elaborating an increasingly coherent vision of a different kind of medicine.
As the prospects and challenges of PM loom before us, there ais urgent need to consider its implications for the social organization of medicine, particularly for the physician–patient relationship.