Just as clothes are made to match a person’s body size, tailor-made medicine conducts diagnosis and treatment matched to the genetic information of the individual patient. The effectiveness and side effects of drugs differ according to the genetic type of an individual. To achieve maximum benefit, therefore, methods of administering the drugs should ideally be changed based on the person’s genetic information. To help bring about the realization of such made-to-order drugs, the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology implemented, in a five-year plan starting in 2003, a project called Biobank to create a database of the relationship between disease and the genetic information of several hundred thousand people.