Browsing by Author "Desai, Khusboo"
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Item Addressing Race and Genetics Health Disparities in the Age of Personalized Medicine(Science Progress, 2011) Rugnetta, Michael; Desai, KhusbooThe human genome sequence has been fully completed for a decade now and the price of full genome sequencing is dropping precipitously. Many believe that with these developments, a new era of personalized medicine is about to hit full speed. Personalized medicine is essentially “the use of genetic susceptibility or pharmacogenetic testing to tailor an individual’s preventive care or drug therapy,” although some definitions also include the development of patient outcomes research, health information technology, and care delivery models. Put more simply, it means the development of medicines and therapies tailored to patients’ unique genetic traits and risks. The field is evolving rapidly but many hurdles still remain. Individually tailored drugs based on a patient’s genetic makeup are far off, and the cost of developing drugs for genetic subpopulations with largely similar genetic traits for one or more diseases hinders developments in this arena. Similarly, the lack of standards surrounding direct-to-consumer genetic tests and the lack of robust, large-scale genomic data for many diseases and conditions are additional hurdles.