Precision that improves therapies
It is common sense that individual differences must be taken into account when treating patients in order to improve therapy. Tailoring therapies to individual needs (including medical devices and patient-specific tissues) and responses not only improves the efficacy of a treatment, but also reduces adverse effects. With 3rd generation sequencing, metabolomics and other high-throughput technologies, we now have the ability to customize diagnosis, therapy selection and treatment regimens much more precisely to an individual's exact health status and provide a much more accurate prognosis. In this context, the term precision medicine refers to an emerging treatment approach that takes into account individual genetic/genomic characteristics as well as environmental influences and lifestyle habits, including through data mining using recorded clinical data. As a precise diagnosis and prognosis is based on a variety of genomic and environmental parameters, sophisticated computational and statistical methods are a very important part of this approach.
A variety of methods for analysing biomarkers have been established and validated at the Institute of Precision Medicine. Download file:These methods can be used by faculty members and other research groups associated with HFU for teaching purposes and research projects.