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A decade of promises in personalised cancer medicine: is the honeymoon over?

Robyn L Ward
Med J Aust 2014; 200 (3): . || doi: 10.5694/mja14.00018
Published online: 17 February 2014

Substantive benefits of personalised medicine continue to elude us

For more than a decade now, we have been promised that genetic knowledge would personalise our health care. The media has told us that this information will be our own medical crystal ball, and if we fail to adhere to personalised disease prevention plans we can receive targeted medicines to treat our disease. Support for this future vision of personalised medicine has been unwavering, despite its reported slow progress.1,2


  • Prince of Wales Clinical School, University of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW.


Correspondence: robyn@unsw.edu.au

Competing interests:

I am a member of the Pharmaceutical Benefits Advisory Committee and chair of the Medical Services Advisory Committee and Human Genetics Advisory Committee. The views expressed here do not represent the views of these committees.

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