Figure 1.

An ambitious challenge for medicine is to guarantee targeted care paths, beginning with more personalized approaches. To achieve this goal, it is necessary to have a multi-level approach towards patients. At molecular level the multi omics approach (transcriptomic, metabolomics, genomic, proteomics, epigonomics) provides a deeper understanding of patient conditions from the original causes of diseases to the functional consequences. This information should be integrated with the study of the “exposome”, defined as the totality of exposure experienced by an individual during their life and the health impact of those exposures (Wild CP. Complementing the genome with an “exposome”: The outstanding challenge of environmental exposure measurement in molecular epidemiology. Cancer Epidemiol Biomarkers Prev. 2005; 14(8):1847–1850). Together with the study of clinical features of patients, physicians are able to elaborate a personalized therapy, tailored to the individual patient.