Personalized Medicine in Germany – A current status of scientific articles based on a systematic literature review

Purpose More than 20 years ago, the term Personalized Medicine (PM) was introduced to the public and was related to tailor-made medicines and a treatment considering the individual human genome. In the meantime, the term PM is used in several different contexts with various definitions. Considering this, the aim of this research is to analyze the current status of scientific articles in terms of PM in Germany.

Methods A systematic literature review in PubMed was conducted followed by a grouping of final results. First, the search strategy was defined by verifying PM in the MeSH term database and by limiting the results to Germany only. Thus, the MeSH term “precision medicine” and the term “Germany[Title/Abstract]” were connected by the Boolean operator “AND”. Furthermore, only results in German or English language and those with an available abstract were considered. Second, the results were screened, in- or excluded to the analysis and finally assigned to thematic groups.

Results With the mentioned search strategy 64 articles were identified, all published within the period of 2010 to 2020. After screening the abstracts and afterwards the full texts, 45 articles remained for final analysis. Most of the results were clearly grouped to “PM treatment & diagnosis” (n= 17) followed by “Health economics & cost-effectiveness” (n= 8). Other groups were e.g. “General PM” (n = 7) or “PM & Ethics” (n= 3). Independent of the group, the scope of 1/3 of the articles is related to oncological topics.

Conclusions The number of scientific articles related to PM in Germany is quite low, but there is a thematic trend noticeable. Nevertheless, it could be important to find out which further literature besides the PubMed results was published in and for Germany and if there really is a gap of more than ten years between the first general PM article and the first relation to Germany.

Publication History

Article published online:
02 September 2021