The Ethics of Personalised Medicine: Critical Perspectives

Personalised medicine has been much discussed as a means of great progress in medicine and health care. While it conjures up a vision of holistic medicine tailored to the unique individual and his/her environment, lifestyle and genes, personalised medicine has been commonly used in the medical literature to mean an approach that stratifies patients into groups using biological information. In the first chapter of this edited collection, Sebastian Schleidgen et al suggest a precise definition of personalised medicine following a systematic review of definitions found in relevant PubMed articles: Personalised medicine seeks to improve tailoring and timing of preventative and therapeutic measures by utilising biological, information and biomarkers on the level of molecular disease pathways, genetics, proteomics as well as metabolomics. (p. 20)1 This edited collection has 19 chapters and 47 contributors from a range of disciplines including clinical genetics, oncology, philosophy, law, theology, public health, health economics and political science. The sources for the papers were research undertaken in a four year multidisciplinary project on personalised medicine in oncology, funded by the German Federal Ministry for Education and Research, and papers presented at the 2013 conference on personalised medicine organised by the European Association of Centres of Medical Ethics (EACME). The book is divided into four parts which, in turn, clarify the concept, consider clinical applications and structural aspects of personalised medicine. In the fourth and final part, Jan Schildmann et al make recommendations for the future development of personalised medicine.2