Will "personalized medicine" need personalized laboratory approach?

Background: Medicine is evolving on the whole, so laboratory medicine does. Great emphasis is currently presently placed on personalized medicine, particularly by many of the most influential healthcare-linked institutions, communities, organisations and companies. Methods: Personalized medicine is an appealing terminology, meaning an individualised approach to patients for either diagnosis or treatment using the most advanced and proper scientific and technological tools, which has its basis on a consolidate literature regarding the main ways for drawing more useful information by laboratory tests. Results: A novel approach tailored around personalized medicine would allow construction of a revolutionary healthcare framework, where a list of laboratory tests adopted for each individual should be descriptive enough of the personal metabolic characteristics, as to be useful in a lifelong perspective, with the needed adjustments due to peculiar genetic variations and/or diseases. Conclusions: By a "personalized" approach, supported by informatics and computer science, each individual would benefit of an "in progress" assessment and the variations from the steady state timely evidenced and acknowledged. © 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.