Contribution of research-based pharmaceutical companies in Germany to personalised medicine.

Background: The term Personlised Medicine (PM) was introduced to the public more than 20 years ago and was related to tailor-made medicines and a treatment considering the individual human genome. In the meantime, the term PM can be found with various definitions in several different contexts. Considering this, the aim of this research is to analyse the current status of PM in Germany, especially with regard to scientific articles and the pharmaceutical industry. Methods: First, a systematic literature review was conducted in PubMed and Web of Science. Each search strategy was adapted to the database conditions and consisted of the search terms personalised medicine or the MeSH term precision medicine, additionally pharmaceutical industry and Germany in topic, title or abstract (the Boolean operator AND was applied). Only results in German or English with an available abstract were considered. Second, the websites of all 47 members of the German association of research-based pharmaceutical companies (vfa) were systematically screened referring to their position and communication in terms of PM. Results: The literature research yielded a total of only 4 results. The scope of the papers is nanomedicine, an interview study and gene disorders. The second research part shows differences on the company websites: More than half of the companies have no relation to PM or an analysis was not possible (n=25). Some were categorized with indirect relation (n=3) and on 19 websites PM was communicated in different ways. Conclusions: The literature research clearly shows that although PM is not a new topic and furthermore, the research of pharmaceutical companies in this area is widely required, the number of scientific articles found is very low. The screening of company websites underlines this result as only 19 of 47 companies take a position to PM here and the scope varies greatly. Nevertheless, it is necessary to examine the reasons and how Germany compares to other countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]