The workshop ‘Personalized Medicine Europe: Health, Genes and Society’, cosponsored by the European Science Foundation and the Yoran Institute for Human Genome Research at Tel-Aviv University, Sacker Faculty of Medicine, was held at the Tel-Aviv University campus on June 19–21, 2005. The concept of ‘Personalized Medicine’ marks the expected reform in medicine that is projected to arrive at the clinic in coming decades, harnessing genomics and proteomics technologies for tailoring the most suitable pharmacotherapy for the each patient, based on individual profiling (1, 2, 3, 4; see also list of ‘selected web resources on personalized medicine’). There are high expectations for better pharmacotherapy, allowing drastic reductions in the current alarmingly high rates of adverse drug reactions, accounting to almost 7% of new hospital admissions.5, 6 Personalized medicine is also projected to allow improved treatment efficacies for many diseases. Following the recent success of drug tailoring in oncology with the aid of genomic and proteomic tools, there have been high public expectations for better diagnostic tools to improve treatment outcomes in other fields of medicine. Along with these expectations for improved safety and efficacy in pharmacotherapy, there is a rising anxiety that the arrival of genomic and proteomic technologies to the clinic might jeopardize equity in healthcare, a key principle for national health services of the modern state. Some critics argue that the expectations are too high, given the huge complexity of the human genome and proteome.7 Moreover, new studies suggest that while genes often contribute to disease phenotypes, they are far from determining them. The old question of Nature or Nurture is not about to be solved soon, and moreover, it becomes clear that with few exceptions, genes alone cannot be blamed for failure of drug treatments.

The Tel-Aviv workshop in June 2005 served as a stage for presenting and discussing such new knowledge, at the forefront of science and medicine, along with discussions on societal and ethical implications of this newly gained information. Many questions were raised; some were discussed following the presentations and during the panel discussion on the closing session; most issues remained open, without reaching a consensus. However, asking the right questions is the first and essential step in looking for tentative solutions; in that respect, we hope that the ‘right questions’ about personalized medicine were indeed raised so that we can continue the quest for the best answers.

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