Opinion: Personalized medicine: We’re not there yet
When Francis Collins, then-director of the National Human Genome Research Institute, testified before Congress in 2003 about the significance of sequencing the human genome that year, he introduced personalized medicine as a new concept. He predicted that in 10 years personalized medicine would allow physicians to employ “predictive genetic tests … so that each of us can learn of our individual risks for future illness and practice more effective health maintenance and disease prevention.”
Collins didn’t stop there. By the year 2020, he opined, “gene-based designer drugs are likely to be available for conditions like diabetes, Alzheimer’s disease, hypertension, and many other disorders. Cancer treatment will precisely target the molecular fingerprints of particular tumors, genetic information will be used routinely to give patients more appropriate drug therapy, and the diagnosis and treatment of mental illness will be transformed.”
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