What is personalized medicine: sharpening a vague term based on a systematic literature review

Background: Recently, individualized or personalized medicine (PM)
has become a buzz word in the academic as well as public debate
surrounding health care. However, PM lacks a clear definition and
is open to interpretation. This conceptual vagueness complicates
public discourse on chances, risks and limits of PM. Furthermore,
stakeholders might use it to further their respective interests and
preferences. For these reasons it is important to have a shared
understanding of PM. In this paper, we present a sufficiently
precise as well as adequate definition of PM with the potential of
wide acceptance. Methods: For this purpose, in a first step a
systematic literature review was conducted to understand how PM is
actually used in scientific practice. PubMed was searched using the
keywords "individualized medicine"