title: The forthcoming era of precision medicine.
abstract: The aim of this essay is to present the definition and principles of personalized or precision medicine, the perspective and barriers to its development and clinical application. The implementation of precision medicine in health care requires the coordinated efforts of all health care stakeholders (the biomedical community, government, regulatory bodies, patients' groups). Particularly, translational research with the integration of genomic and comprehensive data from all levels of the organism ("big data"), development of bioinformatics platforms enabling network analysis of disease etiopathogenesis, development of a legislative framework for handling personal data, and new paradigms of medical education are necessary for successful application of the concept of precision medicine in health care.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  In the present and future era of precision medicine, the collaboration of all participants in health care is necessary for its realization, resulting in improvement of diagnosis, prevention and therapy, based on a holistic, individually tailored approach.
authors.affiliation: Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Zagreb, Croatia. sgamulin@hazu.hr.
authors.forename: Stjepan
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Gamulin
mesh_terms: D019468:Disease Management; D015894:Genome, Human; D006694:Holistic Health; D006801:Humans; D057285:Precision Medicine / Q000639:trends*; D049490:Systems Biology; D057170:Translational Research, Biomedical
keywords: Personalized medicine; Precision medicine