Quo vadis personalized medicine?

Personalized medicine introduces a daunting foray into the complexities, wonders and paradoxes of modern healthcare'Welcome to the real world Medicine has always attempted to be personalized.The patient-doctor relationship, both extolled and beleaguered, has historical aspirations and cultural roots in healing each person.The recent excitement in healthcare has been created by the prospect of personalizing medicine with genomic knowledge.The launch of this new journal, Personalized Medicine, heralds the time to integrate: for medicine, to adapt genomic tools; and for genomics, to delve into healthcare delivery.While there are multiple challenges on both the genomic and healthcare fronts, it is the latter that will be discussed here.Five years ago we would have needed to address the complexity and cost of genotyping and raise concerns about the privatization of genomic information.Today, we can thank the biotechnology industry for quantum leaps in engineering that allow genotypes to be simpler and less expensive to measure than many serological factors.And thanks to the efforts of the Human Genome Project and the International HapMap Consortium, there is a wealth of sequence and polymorphism data readily accessible in comprehensively designed websites.