Research and practice coming together. The advent of personalized medicine is bringing clinical research and practice closer together.

In the early days of synthetic drugs, just after the discovery of penicillin, doctors knew very little about pharmaceuticals and simply followed the manufacturer’s ‘advice’ when prescribing them for patients. This made sense in a period when pills were almost worshipped as panaceas for whatever ailment they were supposed to treat. Over time though, clinical experience revealed a more nuanced picture; the efficacy of drugs increasingly had to be balanced against side effects and other factors, including the development of resistance to antibiotics and eventually cost. These factors put the onus on doctors to make appropriate prescriptions, weighing all the information. To do so, it became necessary for doctors to know about both the benefits and side effects of drugs—in other words, to be informed about the results of clinical research. This development led to calls for closer links between clinical research and the medical front line; it also enabled the rise of patient advocacy groups, as well as increasing efforts to involve both general practitioners (GPs) and hospital doctors more closely in clinical trials.