The evolving field of personalised medicine is playing an increasingly important 
role in cancer prevention, diagnosis, prognosis and therapeutics. Its importance 
in clinical management is demonstrated by the recent introduction into routine 
clinical practice of various individualised, molecularly targeted therapies with 
increased efficacy and/or reduced toxicity. The identification of cancer 
predisposition genes, such as the BRCA genes in breast cancer, permits screening 
programmes to identify patients "at-risk" of developing cancer and helps them 
make decisions on individual risk-modification behaviours. Personalised medicine 
also plays an increasingly important role in cancer treatment. It is 
increasingly clear that there are molecularly distinct subtypes of various 
common cancers, with different therapeutic approaches required for each subtype, 
for example, the use of the monoclonal antibodies (trastuzumab and cetuximab) in 
HER2-positive breast cancer and wild-type KRAS colorectal cancer; tyrosine 
kinase inhibitors (imatinib, gefitinib, erlotinib and crizotinib) in chronic 
myeloid leukaemia, gastrointestinal stromal tumours and non-small-cell lung 
cancer and intracellular agents (vemurafenib and olaparib) in metastatic 
malignant melanoma and ovarian, breast and prostate cancer. The efficacy of 
various targeted therapies in such disparate tumours suggests that we are 
entering an era in which treatment decisions will be based on tumour molecular 
abnormality profile or "signature," rather than tumour tissue type or anatomical 
site of origin, improving patient prognosis and quality of life. This mini 
review focuses on the role of personalised medicine in cancer prevention and 
treatment as well as its future direction in oncology.