Birth of a Discipline: Personalized and Precision Medicine (PPM) Informatics

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the field of PPM including fundamental concepts of PPM and also established and emerging frameworks of PPM. By adopting a paradigm-based description, the book encompasses seemingly different but ultimately highly interconnected formats of workflows both for the development and deployment of PPM modalities in research and clinical settings. The chapter describes the critical ways by which informatics supports and enables PPM and sets the stage for the reader to dive into the details of the chapters to follow.