REVIEW
Precision Medicine in Idiopathic Pulmonary Fibrosis The dawn of wishful thinking
 
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1
Division of Immunology, Biomedical Sciences Research Center “Alexander Fleming”, Athens, Greece
 
2
Second Respiratory Medicine Department, “Attikon” University Hospital, Athens Medical School, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Athens, Greece
 
3
First Academic Department of Pneumonology, Hospital for Diseases of the Chest, “Sotiria”, Medical School, University of Athens, Athens, Greece
 
 
Corresponding author
Argyris Tzouvelekis   

Biomedical Sciences Research Center “Alexander Fleming”, Division of Immunology, Vari 16672, Athens, Greece
 
 
Pneumon 2016;29(3):217-223
 
KEYWORDS
ABSTRACT
The conceptualization of precision medicine and the determinants of individuality in disease predisposition and treatment response represent a methodological revival of an emblematic figure of ancient Greece, called Hippocrates. The Human Genome Project truly revolutionized the quest for genomic anatomy and set the basis for molecular profiling of each individual in the context of the disease. Almost a year ago USA president Obama announced a research initiative that aims to revolutionize a new era in precision medicine mainly focusing in the area of oncology (www.whitehouse.gov/precisionmedicine). Despite all these cornerstone events precision medicine approaches in chronic lung diseases and particularly IPF have significantly lagged behind. For many chronic lung diseases we apply theoretically live-saving treatments without absolute-knowledge of their pathogenesis and without taking into consideration disease complexity and heterogeneity. As a consequence many of these therapeutic approaches lead to fatal side-effects. This short review article aims to summarize the current state of knowledge in the prognostic and therapeutic field of IPF, underline mistakes that have been applied in the field of clinical trials and have been carried out for many years and assess ways to optimize the use of “omics” in the everyday clinical practice in order to reformulate the Hippocrates commandment “to help, or do no harm".
 
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