An increasing number of heart failure patients are treated with a number of complex devices, i.e. cardiac resynchronization therapy (CRT). Recently completed and ongoing clinical trials such as MADIT-CRT and EchoCRT provide evidence of a growing number of CRT patients, in need of individualised treatment.

In technology that promises to one day allow drug delivery to be tailored to an individual patient and a particular cancer tumor, researchers at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine, have developed an efficient system for delivering siRNA into primary cells. The work on Personalized Cancer treatment new way will be published in the May 17 in the advance on-line edition of Nature Biotechnology.

Cancer patients can survive longer under treatments based on their individual genetic profiles, according to a nationwide study released jointly today by Phoenix-area healthcare organizations.

Canada has the opportunity to be an international leader in personalized medicine and needs to invest in this area for the health of Canadians and to reap the benefits of job creation, writes Dr. Thomas Hudson in a commentary.

Identifying a single, common variation in a person's genetic information improves prediction of his or her risk of a heart attack or other heart disease events and thus, choice of the best treatment accordingly, said researchers at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston.

Medicine has moved a little bit closer to the era of tailor-made treatments, based on the unique genetic profiles of individual patients, according to recent research conducted by Dr Rima Rozen of the Research Institute of the McGill University Health Centre (RI MUHC) at the Montreal Children's Hospital and McGill University.

A new study, presented at the SNM 55th Annual Meeting, shows the potential to pre-target the treatment of cancer cells—bringing personalized medicine one step closer from the laboratory to patients. By combining new molecular imaging techniques with targeted therapy, pretargeting offers cancer patients a more individualized treatment that can increase the effectiveness of therapies and minimize discomfort experienced during treatment.

Notch, a protein known to govern the determination of cell differentiation into different kinds of tissues in embryos, plays a critical role in bone formation and strength later in life, said researchers from Baylor College of Medicine in Houston in a report that appears online today in the journal Nature Medicine.

The time has come for breast cancer risk assessment, counseling and genetic testing to move from cancer specialists to the realm of primary care, according to a presentation at the AAAS annual meeting, held this year in Boston.

With its promises of more effective, low-cost therapies for cancer, heart disease, Alzheimer’s and other medical conditions, personalized medicine is moving forward but at a slow pace that’s not keeping up with its high expectations, according to an article scheduled for the Feb. 11 issue of Chemical & Engineering News, ACS’ weekly newsmagazine.

One of the nation’s pre-eminent genetic researchers, Eric Hoffman, PhD, of Children’s Research Institute at Children’s National Medical Center, predicts that in relatively short order, medicine’s next innovation--individualized molecular therapies--will have the unprecedented ability to treat muscular dystrophies, and other disorders.

As we enter the era of "personalized" medicine, it is time to take a fresh look at how we evaluate treatments for cancer patients. More emphasis should be put on matching treatment to the patient. Patients would certainly have a better chance of success had their cancer been chemo-sensitive rather than chemo-resistant, where it is more apparent that chemotherapy improves the survival of patients, and where identifying the most effective chemotherapy would be more likely to improve survival.