Pharmacogenomics to achieve precision medicine

Abstract

The term precision medicine was thrust into the national lexicon in early 2015 with the launch of the Precision Medicine Initiative by President Obama in his State of the Union Address. The mission of this National Institutes of Health (NIH) program is “to enable a new era of medicine through research, technology, and policies that empower patients, researchers, and providers to work together toward development of individualized care.”1 Precision medicine promises a greater appreciation of variability within populations—accounting for factors such as genetics, age, comorbidities, medications, lifestyle, and environment—to select a patient’s personalized treatment. It is not a novel idea but rather a renewed focus on personalizing healthcare versus a one-size-fits-all approach. The main driver is rapidly advancing “-omics” technology as well as the gains in knowledge it has enabled through research. The cost for whole genome sequencing, for example, has plummeted over 50,000-fold after the mapping of the human genome was completed in 2003.2