Precision medicine requires a different type of clinical trial that focuses on individual, not average, responses to therapy, says Nicholas J. Schork.
Every day, millions of people are taking medications that will not help them. The top ten highest-grossing drugs in the United States help between 1 in 25 and 1 in 4 of the people who take them (see 'Imprecision medicine' ). For some drugs, such as statins — routinely used to lower cholesterol — as few as 1 in 50 may benefit. There are even drugs that are harmful to certain ethnic groups because of the bias towards white Western participants in classical clinical trials.
Recognition that physicians need to take individual variability into account is driving huge interest in 'precision' medicine. In January, US President Barack Obama announced a US$215-million national Precision Medicine Initiative. This includes, among other things, the establishment of a national database of the genetic and other data of one million people in the United States.
http://www.nature.com/news/personalized-medicine-time-for-one-person-trials-1.17411
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 04 2015, @05:28AM
Yes.
Really that is all to say. It already happens. It is required. That's it. Maybe the news is that there is desire to do it in other categories? Seems highly unlikely that doctors don't do that too.