Researchers analysed thousands of laboratory-made plasmids and discovered that nearly half of them had defects, raising questions of experimental reproducibility.
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When doctors try to figure out whether a patient might become addicted to opioid painkillers, they rely on clinical risk factors like family history, medical history, and other social and environmental clues.
Now, two companies -- Proove Biosciences and Canterbury Healthcare's Innovative Medical Testing (IMT) -- want to add genetic information to that picture in order to improve risk prediction.
But academic geneticists say they may be getting ahead of the science.
Both tests are already being used in clinics around the U.S. – even though experts interviewed by MedPage Today say there are no data on exactly how well they predict risk.
"Any expert in the field would tell you that genetic vulnerability to addiction would involve dozens of SNPs," or genetic variants, said Mary Jeanne Kreek, PhD, an expert in addiction genetics at Rockefeller University in New York City. "The idea that anyone would say they are currently able to definitively evaluate an individual's genetic vulnerability to addiction testing by 1, 2, or 20 variants is quite frankly absurd."
The tests are allowed on the market because...