P4 medicine

P4 Medicine is a term coined by American biologist Leroy Hood, and is short for "Predictive, Preventive, Personalized, and Participatory Medicine." The premise of P4 Medicine is that, over the next 20 years, medical practice will be revolutionized by biotechnology, to manage a person's health, instead of manage a patient's disease.

Current medical practice is to detect serious illness as early as possible, then treat it. With P4 Medicine, extensive data on the health condition of each person, presumably genomic and proteomics data, would be gathered. This data is then used to predict future disease. Systems biology techniques are used to develop methods to prevent the disease from even occurring. Because each person has a unique biological situation and each person's response to treatment is unique, a unique personalized treatment is required for each person.

Hood began with these three P's. At the Institute for Systems Biology's Fifth International Symposium, Dr. Hood said that a conversation with Sergey Brin and Larry Page persuaded Hood that the new medicine required a 4th P, participatory, to indicate that the patient actively participates in the design of their therapy. This would appear to be by analogy with Participatory Design, a concept mostly applied to software, that actively involves the user in the design process.