At the Right Time: Temporal Precision in Personalised Medicine

What the paper says

Personalised medicine was initially heralded as delivering 'the right drug to the right patient at the right time'. Although molecular precision has dominated recent developments, the temporal dimension has remained underexplored. This paper examines how temporal precision is emerging as a defining feature of next-generation precision medicine, driven by algorithmic tools and multiomics data integration. Drawing on qualitative interviews with leading experts in personalised immunotherapy and chronic inflammatory disease (CID) medicine, we identify five ways in which temporal precision is reshaping therapeutic practice: extended prediction, timing, synchronisation, coordination of treatments and feedback effects. We show how personalised cancer vaccines and precision inflammation approaches rely on algorithmic assemblages to anticipate therapy effects, coordinate interventions and dynamically adapt treatment schedules. These innovations highlight a shift from molecular precision to personalisation that incorporates the evolving temporality of both disease and therapy, signalling a new development in precision medicine: Diseases are increasingly treated as dynamic processes, therapies as sequences of timed interventions and patients as embedded in feedback loops between body rhythms, pathology and treatment regimens.