Personalized cancer medicine is defined as medical care based on the particular biological characteristics of the disease process in individual patients. By using genomics and proteomics, individuals can be classified into subpopulations based on their susceptibility to a particular disease or response to a specific treatment. They may then be given preventive or therapeutic interventions that will be most effective given their particular characteristics. In oncology, personalized medicine has the potential to be especially influential in patient treatment because of the complexity and heterogeneity of each form of cancer. However, the current classifications of cancer are not as useful as they need to be for making treatment decisions; current cancer classification.
