Genomic Medicine, Finally 64
Daniel Dvorkin writes "When I first started studying bioinformatics almost fifteen years ago (!) what drew me to the field was the promise that we might soon be able to provide effective, personalized treatments for a wide variety of diseases. There have been some successes along the way, like genetic tests for warfarin dosage, but for the most part our gains in understanding of basic biology haven't been matched by clinical advances. Now it looks like that is at long last about to change, and it's about time.
Too many people suffer and die from too many diseases that we more or less understand, but can't effectively treat. I hated it when I worked in hands-on patient care, and I hate it now in the lab. We are, finally, getting there."
Too many people suffer and die from too many diseases that we more or less understand, but can't effectively treat. I hated it when I worked in hands-on patient care, and I hate it now in the lab. We are, finally, getting there."
Poster should consider going back to the clinic? (Score:3, Informative)
People need to maintain the distinction in their head from gene finding (which still goes on and is one of the subjects of TFA) and clinical care. The impact of genomic medicine on clinical care is still limited and is likely to remain so for the forseeable future because of what genomic medicine is currently good at predicting.
There will be some benefits in selection of oncology protocols in the short term, but knowing cancer genomics does not actually lead to new chemotherapeutic agents except in the long term (even if a drug target is discovered today, if there is no currently approved drug on the market it could take 10-30 years to develop a drug targeting a new class of mutation).
For most other adult disease, the application will be limited to relatively rare outliers like the limb-girdle disease highlighted in the article. Genomic medicine isn't going to change the fact that huge swaths of patients need to take statins, for example. In fact, the 'success' submitter posits (Warfarin) is actually a bust. The actual benefits from pharmacogenetic testing for Warfarin metabolism are swamped by all the other factors which affect Warfarin metabolism (eg diet and other meds). As for Alzheimer's which TFA also mentions, they're still at the stage of recruiting their 40k subjects to sequence at $1000 a pop. The analysis will take thousands of man-hours just to generate some new hypotheses about Alzheimer's which will, in turn, take 10-30 years to lead to new therapeutics (if we're lucky).
The one area where whole exome sequencing and related technologies are likely to change care in a meaningful way is pediatrics and fetal medicine where there are tons of rare, fatal things due to rare point mutations. In these cases, early molecular diagnosis would reduce the diagnostic odyssey and allow early discussion of the goals of care.
Re:Regulatory hurdles (Score:5, Informative)
It is my understanding, that FDA's current stance is that all such person-specific treatments/medicines must be individually approved
There is already some flexibility on that front. Cancer immunotherapies like sipuleucel-T (Provenge, approved in 2010) are unique to each patient.
Re:Poster should consider going back to the clinic (Score:4, Informative)
The actual benefits from pharmacogenetic testing for Warfarin metabolism are swamped by all the other factors which affect Warfarin metabolism (eg diet and other meds).
The FDA disagrees, and so does the evidence [onlinejacc.org]. And there are a whole lot of areas [nih.gov] where pharmacogenetics is starting to have an impact on treatment. In any case, pharmacogenetics is a subset of pharmacogenomics; for example, as I mentioned in another comment [slashdot.org], the lab where I work is working on expression-based tests for prediction of altitude sickness and setting up drug trials.