Although cancer treatments have improved drastically over the past decade, many cancers can adapt to evade therapeutic drugs. To develop more effective cancer treatments, researchers have continued to strive to understand how cancers evolve and interact with other cells in their environment, so therapies can be tailored to individual patients in a process called precision medicine.

Precision medicine is an emerging approach for disease treatment and prevention that takes into account individual variability in genes, environment and lifestyle for each person. This approach allows doctors and researchers to predict more accurately which treatment and prevention strategies for a particular disease will work in which groups of people. It is in contrast to a one-size-fits-all approach, in which disease treatment and prevention strategies are developed for the average person, with less consideration for the differences between individuals.

Although the term precision medicine is relatively new, the concept has been a part of healthcare for many years. In treating cancer as an example, precision oncology is an innovative approach that ensures treatment is specifically designed and targeted to the patient’s unique form of cancer. It is the science of using each patient’s individual genetics, the genes that are mutated, causing their cancer to grow, to create a treatment protocol just for them, based on those genetic mutations.

Cancer specialists who practise precision medicine in their treatment discover what gene mutations are driving the disease and choose targeted therapy that will work for those specific mutations. It would be expected that targeted therapy using this emerging, innovative approach will produce far better results with fewer side effects than standard chemotherapy.