Workshop Introduction: Personalized medicine: desirable, affordable, attainable?

Abstract

The Human Genome Project, the most celebrated human consortium effort in biomedicine and one of the greatest scientific achievements of modern time, has yet to deliver the anticipated improvements in healthcare [1] . The blueprint of a human being, the complete 3.2 billion nucleotides of the human DNA sequence, has been available since April 2002. Up to the present day, however, we still understand very little about the biology of common complex disorders, such as diabetes, hypertension, osteoarthritis, osteoporosis, Alzheimer’s disease, schizophrenia, and depression, despite the fact that the genetic determination of each of these conditions is reliably established.