I just spent the past two days at a Personalized Medicine conference sponsored by Burrill and the Personalized Medicine Coalition. Among the many interesting sessions, dominated by diagnostic company CEOs, Ed Abrahams, the PMC's Executive Director gave a talk that covered the top 10 value propositions for supporting and promoting personalized medicine. Advocates of personalized medicine have stressed its potential to:

1) Detect disease at an earlier stage, when it is easier to treat effectively
2) Enable the selection of optimal therapy and reduce trial-and-error prescribing
3) Reduce adverse drug reactions
4) Increase patient compliance with therapy
5) Improve the selection of targets for drug discovery
6) Reduce the time, cost, and failure rate of clinical trials
7) Revive drugs that failed clinical trials or were withdrawn from the market
8) Avoid withdrawal of marketed drugs
9) Shift the emphasis in medicine from reaction to prevention
10) Reduce the overall cost of healthcare

Seems like a list we could all agree would be great to have. To support his presentation, the PMC published a pithy primer on the topic of personalized medicine which I recommend. (Download report here). As an aside, from my conversations it looks interest in developing diagnostics for neurological diseases is on the rise, but still far behind the developments in oncology.