Precision medicine

The first medical interventions were often individualized but ineffective, because doctors lacked an understanding of disease biology. As medicine became more scientific, physicians started grouping patients by disease. Now, genetic insights let doctors consider their patients' unique make-up when prescribing treatments.

Remarkable progress in sequencing technologies and data handling is making personalized genome analysis an increasingly common feature of health care.

After a series of setbacks, genetic therapies are finally moving beyond small academic trials towards approval as treatments.

Personalized prescribing is gaining momentum, but is there enough evidence for it to become standard clinical practice?

Precision oncology has not been shown to work, and perhaps it never will, says Vinay Prasad.

Living with a rare disease but no concrete diagnosis can be difficult. Genetic sequencing may finally provide a solution.

When data-gathering precision-medicine projects build trust with their users, patients and researchers both benefit.

The US Precision Medicine Initiative (PMI) aims to gather health data on at least one million volunteers. Kathy Hudson, deputy director for science, outreach and policy at the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), led its creation, and spoke to Nature about the challenges she faced.

It may not be possible to protect the identity of genomic data. But how much of a problem is that?

For the benefits of digital medicine to be fully realized, we need not only to find a shared home for personal health data but also to give individuals the right to own them.