"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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