Personalized medicine: a pediatric perspective.

The aim of pediatric personalized medicine is to uniquely combine genetic variation with developmental stage and environmental exposure to provide a tailored preventive, diagnostic, and therapeutic regimen. Recent advances in genomic research have identified many genetic variants that may be related to allergic and inflammatory disease and therapeutic response. These include variants involved in immune response, barrier proteins, and medication response. Current evidence also suggests that the effect of genetic variation often depends on the developmental stage of a child and environmental exposure such as infection or tobacco smoke during a specific stage. Personalized medicine is a new and exciting field with the potential to significantly improve medical care for children and adults.