Challenges of drug discovery for personalized medicine.

Personalized medicine--the treatment best suited for an individual patient--is based on genomic as well as other factors that influence the response to drugs. Besides matching existing drugs to appropriate patients, 'personalization' is being extended to the drug-discovery stage. Several 'omics' technologies are being increasingly used for this purpose and personalized drug-discovery efforts are in progress in major therapeutic areas. Biomarkers are an important link between drug discovery efforts and diagnostics. The concept of personalized medicine is also a driver for the integration of various biotechnologies, such as RNA interference and nanobiotechnology, which are also being applied to drug discovery. The limitations of various approaches to personalized medicine have been identified, as well as the financial implications of fragmenting the markets for drugs for the biopharmaceutical industry, which remains focused on the development of blockbuster drugs.