Precision Medicine for Autoimmune Diseases

<p>Autoimmune diseases have significant economic and social impacts and represent the second-most important market for pharmaceutical companies, which is unsurprising when you consider that, while 1 in 33 Americans will suffer from cancer, 1 in 22 Americans will suffer from an autoimmune disease, costing the US over $100 billion a year. However, the uptake of precision medicine in this area has been slow at best, even though it can be extremely difficult to accurately diagnose and treat patients effectively using the tools that are currently available. If the adoption of precision medicine is to truly gather pace among diseases outside of cancer, there are still several regulatory, technological, and funding-related hurdles to be overcome. Taking lessons learned from within the field of oncology and systematically applying them to areas such as autoimmune disease will enable the development of more effective drugs across a wider range of illnesses. Most importantly, this will lead to a better outcome for patients. <i>Precision Medicine for Autoimmune Diseases</i> summarizes the status, the ongoing activities and provides an outlook to the future. </p>