Precision Medicine is Coming, But Not Anytime Soon
By Beverly Merz,
Harvard Health Blog
| 03. 26. 2015
Untitled Document
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...
Related Articles
Image courtesy National Human Genome Research Institute
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is supposed to encourage effective medical advances while also ensuring that patients and research subjects are protected. This dual mandate demands tricky judgment calls that are made more difficult by outside pressures of several kinds, political, judicial, and especially commercial. This April story at Bloomberg examines one deeply troubling pattern of regulatory capture:
Americans Are Paying Billions to Take Drugs That Don’t Work
Companies are increasingly...
By Elizabeth Chuck, NBC News | 07.09.2024
A Netflix docuseries has put a spotlight on the unregulated world of sperm donation, particularly the lack of stopgap measures that might prevent donors who have been banned by one country from simply going elsewhere to donate more.
Released earlier...
By Amanda Becker and Shefali Luthra, The 19th | 07.08.2024
Image by Duke University Archives from Flickr
Republicans have adopted a slate of policy positions ahead of next week’s convention that does not call for a federal legislative abortion ban, but opens the door to establishing fetal personhood.
The Republican...
By Isabelle Bartram
| 07.17.2024
Image by Kuzzat Altay from Unsplash
Uyghurs, a predominantly Muslim minority in China, are mainly located in the autonomous region of Xinjiang. The Chinese government has pursued an aggressive settlement policy in this region since 1949, with the percentage of Han Chinese in the region increasing from five to forty percent in the second half of the 20th century. Since 2014, the Uyghurs have been subject to persecution and re-education – various sources have estimated that at least one million...