Personalized medicine for the vasculitis patient: Hope for the future?

Personalized medicine is a rapidly emerging and exciting field in medicine. It brings with it the hope of applying patient-specific information, including not only general family and personal history, environmental exposures and clinical findings, but also information regarding the genetic make-up of the patient, to effectively diagnosing the disease, predicting disease severity and treating the disease. In vasculitis, the most immediate application of emerging genetic and proteomic information is possibly in the targeted selection of medications, which may be useful for the particular patient while avoiding adverse drug effects based on understanding of the patient's genetic and proteomic profile. Clinical trials of new drugs for vasculitis should seek to discover and exploit these principles of personalized medicine.