Personalized medicine actually has two meanings. The first, and probably the one most familiar to us in San Francisco, is the trend to have "concierge" style medicine - usually an internist, family practitioner, or Ob/Gyn who takes a panel of patients for a set fee per patient, rather than taking insurance. This is a prominent phenomena in many cities, for a variety of reasons. We may touch on this in another column.

What I want to touch on is the idea of personalized medicine for cancer...