Personalized medicine vs Genome-based medicine

I have a very good series of meeting as part of the Health Sciences Authority, Singapore (HSA) team with the Japanese Pharmaceutical and Medical Devices Agency (PMDA), Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare (MHLW), and the National Institute of Health Sciences (NIHS), as well as the RIKEN Center for Genomics Medicine (CGM).

I learnt a lot just talking the the various agencies. But the highlight for the meeting for me was catching that fleeting comment by Prof Yusuke Nakamura, Director of Riken CGM, that there was a difference between "personalized medicine" and genome-based medicine", and that RIKEN had more of a focus on "genome-based medicine". I thought that was incredibly insightful. So many of the luminaries in PGx toss around the term "personalized medicine" almost as a justification for spending their multimillion $$ budgets but totally missing the point that what they are after really isn't personalizing therapeutics.

In our analogy of the F1 race car driver, it's really no different from developing better and more precise fuel injection systems, or tires that are better suited for the road surface. Technology is great. But after all that we musn't forget that one still needs to navigate and drive fast to get to the finish line, ... with the best time. That is personalized medicine.

See recent editorial: Personalized medicine: are we there yet?