Precision medicine (also called personalised medicine or individualised medicine)
By
Cancer Council NSW
A form of medicine that uses information about a person’s genes, proteins, environment, and lifestyle to prevent, diagnose, or treat disease.
In cancer, precision medicine uses specific information about a person’s tumour to help make a diagnosis, plan treatment, find out how well treatment is working, or make a prognosis.
Precision medicine may also be used to help determine a person’s risk of developing certain types of cancer.
Examples of precision medicine include using molecularly targeted therapies to treat specific types of cancer, e.g. those which have specific targetable mutations, or using biomarkers to help diagnose cancer.
- Precision prevention: A more personalised approach to cancer prevention that uses information about a person’s biology, genes, lifestyle and environment to better understand their cancer risk and tailor prevention, screening or early detection strategies. See also precision medicine, risk assessment and cancer screening.
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