The Rise of Personalized Medicine

http://www.ngpharma.com/news/personalized-medicine/

In a recent study done by professional services firm PricewaterhouseCoopers, it was found the patient response rate to medicine they recived ranged from a low 20 percent to a mediocre 75 percent. Now imagine a world where the medication we recive is tailored to our specific condition using certian genome and molecular data to ensure better a better response to it. Enter personalized medicine.
Personalized medicine is what some in the pharmaceutical industry are calling the future of medicine, and righly so. All people are different, so why would we all take the same medication and expect it to work the same way? Personalized medicine looks to do away with the "one size fits all" approach and design a drug for the specific needs of the patient.
There has been some progress made on the path to making medicine personal. Such websites as 23andme.com offer genetic tests or "geno-typing" services where for a small fee of 300 to 400 dollars a person sends in a saliva sample. With this simple dna test that individual can be tested for a wide rage of different genetic variants. While it is nice to know ahead of time if you are at risk for any kind of disease, this information is only helpful to us if we can use it.
Doctors and Scientists are making progress in cracking the riddle of personal medicine. Simple tests like a blood test or cheek swab could be used to help foreshadow a patients response to certain medicines prior to them even taking them. More positive news also comes in the fact that according to Donald Singer, a professor at the University or Warwick (uk, not rhode island) that within the last year researchers have found more and more genetic markers in more common places. This suggests that the reality of personalized medicine is in the not so distant future. Singer sums up personalized medicine like this:"What we really want is for patients to go to their doctor, get a blood test which could lay out a genetic map, and then prescribe drugs based on the test results."