ABSTRACT
Anyone who works in or near any aspect of healthcare has undoubtedly heard the term personalized medicine. The most common definition is “the right drug for the right person in the right amount.” This phrase refers to the day when all healthcare decisions grow out of each person’s genetic profile. Once science identifies which gene causes which disease and who has a predisposition to what condition, medicines and treatments can become individualized, based on the illnesses we currently have or might one day develop. Sounds promising, doesn’t it? And certainly this only begins to describe the opportunities presented by pharmacogenomics, the study of how an individual’s genetic code relates to drug response.
