Ethical and legal challenges of personalized medicine: Paradigmatic examples of research, prevention, diagnosis and treatment

• Autor(a) principal: Cordeiro,João V.
• Data de Publicação: 2014
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://scielo.pt/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0870-90252014000200007
• topic: Personalized medicine; Biobanks; Genetics; Genomics; Genetic tests; Gene therapy; Public health law and ethics

This article overviews the important ethical and legal challenges of different steps of the personalized medicine journey such as research, prevention, diagnosis and treatment by discussing paradigmatic examples including biobanks, genetic tests and gene therapy. Scientific progress in the area of genetics, the completion of the Human Genome Project and the ability to sequence genomes for competitive prices have offered the promise of revolutionizing healthcare and raised important challenges to classical paradigms in the biomedical law and ethics fields. Issues such as informed consent, privacy and confidentiality, and discrimination require particular analysis in this context. In the last years the concept of personalized medicine has been a source of considerable hype and hope. Law and ethics should be important allies to limit the former and potentiate the later.