• Security challenges in personalized medicine
  • Marzieh Esmaeili,1 Reza Safdari,2 Zohreh Javanmard,3,*
    1. Department of health information management, School of Allied Medical Sciences, Tehran University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, Iran
    2. Department of health information management, School of Allied Medical Sciences, Tehran University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, Iran
    3. Department of health information management, School of Allied Medical Sciences, Tehran University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, Iran


  • Introduction: Personalized medicine is an innovative approach to medical sciences, which – with the advent of big data and the advancement of technology and analytical methods – has revolutionized prevention, diagnosis and treatment stages. In other words, personalized medicine comes down to the connections between genetic, clinical and environmental data – which has resulted in valuable findings. However, storing, accessing, sharing, analyzing and aggregating these data represent several challenges which could hinder the development and utilization of this approach. Therefore, this study aims to review security challenges as a serious concern in the field of personalized medicine.
  • Methods: In this review, a comprehensive search was done in September 2019 through PubMed with the keywords of “Personalized Medicine”, “Security” and “Challenge” alongside their synonyms in the titles and abstracts of the papers without any time limits. The studies which were related to the security challenges in personalized medicine were selected; and non-English papers were left out.
  • Results: The search resulted in 175 papers, among which 13 papers addressing security challenges in personalized medicine were selected based on their titles and abstracts. Due to the confidentiality of human genetic data, the majority of articles had addressed the privacy issues associated with biobanks – which contain human genetic samples linked to other private data with respect to health of individuals. These challenges include data security in storage and sharing that can lead to the identification, extraction or prediction of sensitive attributes such as phenotypes and diseases as well as the prediction or reconstruction of genotypes. In addition to the individual privacy of patients, the information on developing drugs and biotechnologies as well as research results are also worthy of note. Another challenge is the security and integrity of patient data while storing, transmitting and processing them for decision support systems and cloud computing services.
  • Conclusion: Since methods based on personalized medicine are widely considered in various areas of health care such as diagnosis, treatment, prevention, and medication, addressing the security challenges in adapting and developing them is important. Therefore, pinpointing existing security threats and the application of appropriate security mechanisms to mitigate the potential adverse effects are crucial.
  • Keywords: Security, Privacy, Confidentiality, Biobank, Personalized medicine