Personalized Medicine

The concept of Personalised Medicine hinges on the fact that patients with the same symptoms may be suffering from illnesses caused by different molecular and genetic factors. Although on genetic level one human being differs only minimally from another, these minimal genetic differences very often have the potential to decide on their good or bad health.

And the success of a therapy often depends on the genetic disposition of the patient. What will cure one patient does not have any effect on another. And so it depends for example on the individual metabolism whether a drug remains in the bloodstream long enough for its action to develop. These differences in the so-called pharmacokinetics are also the cause of more or less pronounced side effects of medical drugs. In the USA, every one in four deaths is already reported to be due to detrimental side effects of drugs.

To solve these problems, Personalised Medicine pursues the approach of establishing - before any drugs are administered - whether a patient will respond to a therapy and whether the body will tolerate it well. This involves a so-called biomarker test that enables the individual to be allocated to a particular group of patients, for whom a customised therapy is available.

Personalised Medicine therefore has the potential to overcome the key challenges and problems encountered today in the development of drugs and medication:
•    inadequate safety and efficacy of the drugs in the patient,
•    lack of efficiency in the development of drugs due to long development times,
•    high costs and high failure rates on the part of the industry.

In the Munich Leading-Edge Cluster, biotechnology companies and academic groups work together under the guiding concept of Personalised Medicine on about 30 research projects, in which new drugs and technologies are developed.