From One-Size-Fits-All to Precision Medicine

The use of a single treatment in heterogeneous populations has proved problematic in clinical trials undertaken in patients with neurodegenerative diseases. This one-size-fits-all approach (left) leads to a scenario whereby some patients may benefit from therapy but others do not. Stratified medicine (centre) improves on the approach by enabling patients to be separated into more homogeneous groups based on demographics, clinical phenotype and molecular subtypes. More recent advances in technology are enabling a transition to a precision medicine paradigm (right), incorporating phenotypic and genotypic data to guide individualized therapy.