Tailored treatments - Different people respond differently to the same therapy: while one treatment brings about the desired success in one group of patients with e.g. colon cancer, it does not change the condition of other groups at all, or even leads to adverse effects (left). The reason: the genetic makeup and metabolic profile of each individual patient influences the effect of a drug. Personalized medicine takes these individual patterns of cellular and metabolic products into account in the diagnostic phase: biomarker diagnostics separates patients into groups with similar characteristics, and provides information on the best individual treatment. This should enable all patients to benefit from their own, 'personal' therapy.