Personalized Medicine and the Future of Healthcare

"Personalized medicine is having an incredible impact on the way we think about drug development and clinical trials." Isan Chen MD, Chief Medical and Development Officer, Mirati Therapeutics

Advances in basic molecular science are paving the way for increasingly targeted therapies that address the unique biological mechanisms involved in a patient’s illness. Ultimately, medicines may become truly “personalized,” allowing for a fully customized approach to health care that takes into account an individual patient’s medical history, disease risk, and pathology, and selects the most promising course of treatment based on these and other characteristics.

This vision for the future may be a long way off, since translating scientific advances into targeted therapies has not proven to be quick or easy. However, taking advantage of innovative clinical trial designs could lead to more efficient clinical trials that do a better job of matching treatments to specific patient populations and speed the development of targeted therapies.

From Big Data to Genomics testing and targeted therapeutics, Dr. Chen discusses the disruptive approach to next generation clinical development.