INTRODUCTION
Precision medicine is defined as a targeted approach to disease prevention and management by incorporating each patient's genetic and lifestyle variability to improve diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment.1 Of note, the terms precision medicine and personalized medicine are often used interchangeably in the literature. Although there are similarities between the concepts, many argue that clinicians have always treated patients using a personalized approach.2 While personalized medicine may refer to creating a unique and patient-centered treatment plan for an individual patient, precision medicine is distinct in that it involves utilizing genomics, epigenetic factors, and biomarkers to predict a patient's prognosis and response to a given therapy. This paper will exclusively use the term precision medicine (abbreviated PM) to refer to this idea.
Many medical sub-specialties have already incorporated PM into practice and oncology has been at the forefront of this trend. A 2018 study showed 31 drugs that were either genome-targeted or genome-informed have been approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) since 2006.3 One example is the management of chronic myeloid leukemia with imatinib, where the integration of PM to identify and inhibit an abnormal BCR-ABL tyrosine kinase in a select subset of patients yields a 95% response rate and can prolong quality-adjusted life by approximately 9 years.4 The FDA approval for vemurafenib in the treatment of unresectable or metastatic melanoma with the BRAFV600E mutation in 2011 set the stage for how PM can be used in melanoma to improve outcomes.
Many medical sub-specialties have already incorporated PM into practice and oncology has been at the forefront of this trend. A 2018 study showed 31 drugs that were either genome-targeted or genome-informed have been approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) since 2006.3 One example is the management of chronic myeloid leukemia with imatinib, where the integration of PM to identify and inhibit an abnormal BCR-ABL tyrosine kinase in a select subset of patients yields a 95% response rate and can prolong quality-adjusted life by approximately 9 years.4 The FDA approval for vemurafenib in the treatment of unresectable or metastatic melanoma with the BRAFV600E mutation in 2011 set the stage for how PM can be used in melanoma to improve outcomes.
