New developments in medicine are coming thick and fast. Technological advances are increasingly making it possible to understand diseases and the processes taking place in the human body down to the level of individual genes and cells. This brings definite benefits for patients. The earlier an accurate diagnosis can be made and the more precisely a disease can be treated, the greater the prospects of a cure or an improvement in the patient’s quality of life. Nowadays, treatments can be tailored to individual patients more and more effectively. This is what is known as precision medicine and the pioneering field in this area is oncology. We now know that every tumor is unique. If we can analyze the genome of tumor cells, for example, we will have a better chance of making a targeted attack on their weak points.

Gene analyses of this kind and other modern diagnostic methods produce large volumes of data. Artificial intelligence makes it easier to evaluate these data and, for instance, to detect patterns that indicate why diseases occur. Therefore, the hope is that it will be possible in the future to prevent, diagnose and treat many diseases much more effectively than in the past.

The growing volume of data in the field of medicine must be used in order to achieve this. The central elements of this process are the interdisciplinary cooperation between researchers at the interfaces to medicine – for example from the fields of informatics, biomedicine and law – and the involvement of the patients, because we can only shape the medicine of the future by working together as a society. To gain a better understanding of the accompanying opportunities, we have shone a spotlight on different aspects of this subject. They range from a common platform for data sharing to groundbreaking new technologies and questions of ethics and data protection.