President Obama’s announcement of a Precision Medicine Initiative was one of the few items in this year’s State of the Union address to garner bipartisan support. And for good reason. Precision medicine, also known as personalized medicine, offers the promise of health care — from prevention to diagnosis to treatment — based on your unique DNA profile. Who wouldn’t want that?
We’ve already had a taste of precision medicine. Relatively low-tech therapies like eyeglasses, orthotic devices, allergy treatments, and blood transfusions have long been personalized for the individual. Genetic analysis of tumors is now routine, spawning new medications like Herceptin trastuzumab (Herceptin) for breast cancer.
The Precision Medicine Initiative aims to ramp up customized medical care exponentially. It calls for increased funding to accelerate sequencing of a million people’s genomes — the entire array of an individual’s genes. With that information in hand, the initiative will be able to develop more effective treatments for cancer and other diseases.
Getting to precision care will require new diagnostic tests to decipher some or all of a person’s genome. These tests...
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Aggregated News
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration late last year approved two breakthrough gene therapies for sickle cell disease patients. Now a new federal program seeks to make these life-changing treatments available to patients with low incomes — and it could...
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Vitaly Kushnir’s fertility clinic offers to screen an embryo to predict a baby’s sex, but the service can lead to ethically murky territory, like when a couple wanted it so their first child could be a boy.
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