Each person’s genetic makeup is unique, and the thousands of treatments and medicines currently available to patients vary in how they impact different subsets of the population. This is especially true for diseases such as cancer and autoimmune conditions, which are integrally-tied to a person’s genome. It’s why scientists today understand that no two tumors are alike, and the condition broadly referred to as "cancer" is in fact a group of hundreds of different diseases.
Personalized medicine, an emerging field of biopharmaceutical research, accounts for these differences and seeks to address how certain treatments are more suitable for some patients, compared to others. This area of research, also known as “precision” or “individualized” medicine, uses diagnostic tools to identify specific biological markers to predict the likelihood of response, which can help physicians select the right treatments for the right patients.
At Bristol-Myers Squibb (BMS), thousands of researchers are working every day to make personalized medicine a reality for more patients.