The ghost of personalized medicine

Drug therapies tailored to the DNA profiles of individual patients could change the face of medicine, but such treatments aren't commonly used in the clinic.

Written byBob Grant

| 4 min read

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"Doctor's Visit" (detail)JAN STEEN

The US Food and Drug Administration recommends that doctors genotype patients before prescribing more than 70 commonly-used medications for specific genetic biomarkers. These tests, the agency suggests, can help physicians identify those in which the drug is less efficacious, poorly metabolized, or dangerous. But medicine is still far from a day when drugs and treatment regimes are fitted precisely to a patient's genomic profile.

According to a 2008 survey conducted by the American Medical Association (AMA) and Medco Research Institute, even though 98 percent of physicians agreed that the genetic profiles of their patients may influence drug therapy, only 10 percent believed they were adequately informed about how to test their patients for biomarkers that may predict the safety and/or efficacy of a particular drug.

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Meet the Author

Bob Grant
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From 2017 to 2022, Bob Grant was Editor in Chief of The Scientist, where he started in 2007 as a Staff Writer. Before joining the team, he worked as a reporter at Audubon and earned a master’s degree in science journalism from New York University. In his previous life, he pursued a career in science, getting a bachelor’s degree in wildlife biology from Montana State University and a master’s degree in marine biology from the College of Charleston in South Carolina. Bob edited Reading Frames and other sections of the magazine.
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