Personalized medicine is a new current field in medicine which emerged with the development of the genetic technology and its use in biomedicine. In contrast to the traditional approach, it puts an individual in the foreground. Thus, it builds the entire diagnosis, therapy, and prevention on the patient’s genetic profile. It realizes that every individual is different, which it considers in all the medical phases. This is the case of an innovative approach which introduces essential advantages in the field of medical treatment, as it ensures the patient to be treated more usefully and more efficiently. However, because it is based on the use of new genetic technologies, there are many moral, ethical and also legal questions. The first complication occurs in the conception of the genetic data, as it is not clear what kind of significance should be attributed to it. There are namely the data which reveal much more than the other personal data. They are problematic because they do not reveal only that what they were acquired for and because they are not only relevant regarding the patient who gave his consent regarding the research but also regarding the patient’s relatives. Therefore, it is important that an appropriate security of such data is ensured and thus the patient’s right to privacy is protected. It is necessary to prevent that everybody could have the access to these data because of their sensitivity. Because the genetic data reveal the characteristics of an individual, it is necessary to prevent possible misuses which would enable discrimination on their basis. The issues of patenting the genetic inventions are also pointed out in the thesis. It is the field where the subject of the patenting is mainly something alive and which already exists in nature. Therefore, the patentability is questionable.
|
