Towards Personalized Medicine: Strategies for rare diseases and cancer

Todays health care faces huge challenges which requires new concepts in the organisation of patient care. It has been proven for many disease entities that individual patient care concepts have better outcome in terms of curation, survival and acceptance by the patients. Also, prevention of diseases or their detection in very early stages will help to improve treatment outcome and reduce costs in the long run. With this presentation I will highlight the role of Medical Genetics in this process of prediction/prevention of diseases and in individualized health care concepts. I will present two organisational structures, the Center for Rare Diseases, and the Center for Personalized Medicine of the University of Tübingen which require new interdisciplinary organisational structures. In genetic diagnostics, the advantages moving away from single gene analysis towards genome-wide analysis as a major hallmark of both centers will be highlighted. This shift in diagnostic principles which leads to the detection of high risk factors in cancer and cardiological diseases does allow first prediction and subsequently prevention strategies in the unaffected population.