WIKIMEDIA COMMONS, NODAR KHERKHEULIDZE
Over the past decade there has been a groundswell of interest in personalized medicine, where the selection of a particular therapeutic, or its dosage, is individually tailored for specific patient populations based on shared genetic characteristics. Beyond providing patients with more effective care, personalized medicine offers to reduce healthcare costs by eliminating the time and expense associated with ineffective, or even harmful, treatments. Personalized medicine may also allow pharmaceutical companies to recoup resources by identifying subsets of patients that respond to a medicine that failed to prove effective for the patient population as a whole.
These benefits notwithstanding, however, there are a number of issues that may hinder the widespread implementation of personalized medicine. One important impediment is the current legal battle over the ability ...
