Personalized vascular medicine: Individualizing drug therapy

Personalized medicine refers to the application of an individual’s biological fingerprint – the comprehensive dataset of unique biological information – to optimize medical care. While the principle itself is straightforward, its implementation remains challenging. Advances in pharmacogenomics as well as functional assays of vascular biology now permit improved characterization of an individual’s response to medical therapy for vascular disease. This review describes novel strategies designed to permit tailoring of four major pharmacotherapeutic drug classes within vascular medicine: antiplatelet therapy, antihypertensive therapy, lipid-lowering therapy, and antithrombotic therapy. Translation to routine clinical practice awaits the results of ongoing randomized clinical trials comparing personalized approaches with standard of care management.