Welcome to the <i> Journal of Personalized Medicine </i> : A New Open-Access Platform for Research on Optimal Individual Healthcare

Abstract

A new vision of personalized medicine or personalized healthcare has evolved as a consequence of remarkable recent advances in technologies that allow to look at individual variation across the entire human genome and to identify personal risk factors behind many diseases and responses to therapy. These advances have greatly increased our understanding of how interactions between the entire genome and nongenomic factors result in health and disease and in therapeutic response. The challenge is now to translate this knowledge into benefits for the individual patient. I expect the Journal of Personalized Medicine to become the premier venue for the rapid and freely accessible publication of high quality manuscripts dealing with this vision for scientists around the world. Personalized medicine is not a new idea or revolution as physicians have always treated patients on the basis of the available knowledge and the probability that a certain medication will benefit the patient. The historical writings of Hippocrates, Garrod, Osler and others already emphasized the centrality of “treating the patient, not the disease”. What we have witnessed in the last decade, however, is a breathtaking acceleration in understanding human genetic diversity as the result of a technological revolution. Densely packed microarrays with up to five million oligonucleotides are able to detect millions of sequence variants such as single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) or copy number variants (CNVs), other sequence changes or RNAs for the price of a “normal” laboratory test. This allows genome wide association studies (GWAS) or gene expression studies in thousands of patients. So-called next generation sequencing technologies have reduced the cost of reading DNA literally a million-fold (!) since the end of the Human Genome Project. Genome sequences by the thousands are thus on the horizon. Approximately 3000 genomes were sequenced by the end of 2010 and it is predicted that by the end of 2011, 30000 human genome sequences will be available in public databases [1]. The $1000 human genome sequence is most likely possible within the next three years.