Personalised medicine: Priority setting and opportunity costs in European public health care systems

“Personalised medicine†is currently attracting considerable attention and raising high hopes and expectations in modern medicine. The term “personalised medicine†denotes the use of genetic or other biomarker information it does not focus on a more personal patient-doctor relationship. Furthermore, personalised medicine is associated with ethical problems like priority setting and opportunity costs in solidarity-based public health care systems. Personalised medicine provides modern, highly specific and expensive diagnostics and treatments, which serve only limited subgroups of patients. At the same time, research in other fields of clinical medicine, which could serve more than such patient subgroups, remain underfunded.