Slashdot Mirror
Genomic Medicine, Finally
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."
Might as well have just done:
Title: GABBO
Summary: GABBO is coming!
Article: Who is GABBO? No one knows, but he's coming soon!
Healthy long lives are a result of the combination of active lifestyles, good diet and the ability to remove sickness with the least amount of permanent damage. You can eat a genetically pure diet with perfect amounts of nutrients and still end up getting skin cancer. Medicine should not be your first stop to trying to be healthy but at the same time, It's necessary.
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.
The clinical trials framework that's evolved over the decades isn't really equipped to deal with personalized medicine, but that's starting to change. Where I work, we're starting to understand the genomic basis of altitude sickness and putting together treatment trials on that basis. This is an area where the potential market is pretty large, of course, and for rare diseases that affect small numbers of people it's going to be harder, but if we can develop a generally accepted body of protocols for individualized trials then it should be possible to apply this to smaller groups as time goes by.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Are Native American lands bound by the FDA?