Ethics and Privacy Considerations for Systems Biology Applications in Predictive and Personalized Medicine

Personalized Medicine: The History

While medicine has always been, to some extent, “personalized” (for example, even ancient codes of medical ethics spoke of the ethical expectations of physicians to consider the well being of individual patients (Daikos, 2007), our current preoccupation with personalized medicine evolved from the new capacity to take “trial-and-error” out of the modern drug development process (Naylor & Chen, 2010). Unlike personalized medicine practiced for thousands of years, in which clinical symptoms derived at the physiological level (e.g., pulse rhythms, tongue color, temperature, pain points, and facial characteristics) were used to “personalize” diagnosis and treatment regimen (e.g., compound formulation of herbal medicine), modern personalized medicine seek to incorporate molecular information of the patient into modern medical decision makings. Optimal administration of drugs would be customized for each individual, after his/her unique genetic makeup is retrieved from molecular medical records to be created and taken into considerations.